A children's Christmas choir was left in tears after shopping centre security guards told them to shut up.
The 23 children - aged three to five - were ordered to stop singing carols because they were too noisy.
Nursery school teachers had taken the kids to entertain shoppers at Nottingham's Exchange Arcade, reports the Sun.
Claire Ellis, 38, mother of three-year-old singer Harrison, said: "It's disgusting. Christmas is a time for hearing little ones sing. Naturally they get excited but this was a special day for them."
Sharon Hastings, supervisor at Jesters Child Care Nursery, in Gedling, Notts, said: "I couldn't believe it when we were asked to leave. We hadn't caused any disruption and we weren't being loud."
And store manager Lorraine Harvey said: "None of our customers complained about the kids."
But security staff said the children were being noisy and had already been asked to quieten down before they intervened.
Exchange Arcade manager Joe Joseph said: "I was told by the security guards that they were making a noise - and not singing."
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Burglars gave money to victim
Romanian police are looking for two burglars who broke into an woman's apartment - and left her some money.
Filofteia Stefan, 86, from Constanta, told police two young men, wearing masks, trashed her apartment.
She said they rummaged for money or valuables but found only her wallet with the equivalent of 50p inside.
The burglars then gave the woman all of their loose change - and left without taking anything.
The victim handed the money - more than £1 - to the police for fingerprint analysis.
Filofteia Stefan, 86, from Constanta, told police two young men, wearing masks, trashed her apartment.
She said they rummaged for money or valuables but found only her wallet with the equivalent of 50p inside.
The burglars then gave the woman all of their loose change - and left without taking anything.
The victim handed the money - more than £1 - to the police for fingerprint analysis.
Apple could sell 9 million Macs in 2007
Was it just five years ago that Apple Computer was struggling with a major shift in platform architecture and facing a new and improved version of Windows? It was, and back then more than a few technology commentators and anonymous nerds on the Internet were predicting the end for Apple Computer. Well, the more things stay the same, the more they change. Five years later Apple Computer is again challenged by a shift in platform architecture and a new and improved version of Windows, but that's where the similarity ends. Rather than doomsayers predicting the end, we have soothsayers projecting a big year for Apple in 2007. Credit Jeff Gamet at the MacObserver for the jaw-dropping quote from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.
"We believe Mac market share can grow by 1 percent again in CY07, ending the year at around 4 percent, with an average for the year of 3.5 percent. In our estimation, an increase in Mac market share to 3.5 percent would lead to upside to Street CY07 EPS of $0.34 or 11.6 percent."
That would be a jump from around 2.8 percent of the market now, and could work out to a staggering 9 million Macs sold in 2007. Even the most zealous Mac enthusiast might have a hard time believing that, if it weren't for the fact that last quarter Mac sales surged to 1.6 million, and it is looking increasingly possible that Apple could sell 2 million Macs this holiday quarter.
What is behind this good news for the Mac? Scott Ferguson at eWeek attributes it to four factors in Munster's analysis, even though I only counted three.
* Transition to Intel
* iPod Halo Effect
* Boot Camp
Certainly each of those would make sense, and another possibility would be the popular perception that Windows has security issues. Unfortunately, it's unlikely the reason for the Mac's resurgence can ever be definitively proven, due both to a lack of public information and likely overlap between possibilities, but one point can no longer be debated.
The Mac is back.
"We believe Mac market share can grow by 1 percent again in CY07, ending the year at around 4 percent, with an average for the year of 3.5 percent. In our estimation, an increase in Mac market share to 3.5 percent would lead to upside to Street CY07 EPS of $0.34 or 11.6 percent."
That would be a jump from around 2.8 percent of the market now, and could work out to a staggering 9 million Macs sold in 2007. Even the most zealous Mac enthusiast might have a hard time believing that, if it weren't for the fact that last quarter Mac sales surged to 1.6 million, and it is looking increasingly possible that Apple could sell 2 million Macs this holiday quarter.
What is behind this good news for the Mac? Scott Ferguson at eWeek attributes it to four factors in Munster's analysis, even though I only counted three.
* Transition to Intel
* iPod Halo Effect
* Boot Camp
Certainly each of those would make sense, and another possibility would be the popular perception that Windows has security issues. Unfortunately, it's unlikely the reason for the Mac's resurgence can ever be definitively proven, due both to a lack of public information and likely overlap between possibilities, but one point can no longer be debated.
The Mac is back.
Nintendo to recall 3.2 million Wii hand straps
Nintendo has said it will recall 3.2 million hand straps for its new Wii games console after reports of enthusiastic users inadvertently throwing the motion-sensing controller into their TV screens.
"We are announcing the recall of 3.2 million straps for the Wii computer remote controllers," Nintendo spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa said.
"The decision comes after reports that some users in the United States threw their controllers when playing with Wii sports software," he said.
By waving or swinging the controller, it can serve as a sword, tennis racket or car steering wheel.
But websites dubbed "Wii have a problem" and "Wii damage" have chronicled injuries and wreckage reportedly inflicted by Nintendo game controllers sent awry in the heat of play by wild swipes, loose grips or snapped wrist straps.
"We are announcing the recall of 3.2 million straps for the Wii computer remote controllers," Nintendo spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa said.
"The decision comes after reports that some users in the United States threw their controllers when playing with Wii sports software," he said.
By waving or swinging the controller, it can serve as a sword, tennis racket or car steering wheel.
But websites dubbed "Wii have a problem" and "Wii damage" have chronicled injuries and wreckage reportedly inflicted by Nintendo game controllers sent awry in the heat of play by wild swipes, loose grips or snapped wrist straps.
Friday, December 15, 2006
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Even if they're off, cellphones allow FBI to listen in
It should come as no surprise that cellphone calls may be tapped by law enforcement.
But authorities also can use cellphones to eavesdrop on suspects, even when the devices are off.
The FBI converted the Nextel cellphones of two alleged New York mobsters into "roving bugs," microphones that relayed conversations when the phones seemed to be inactive, according to recent court documents.
Authorities won't reveal how they did this. But a countersurveillance expert said Nextel, Motorola Razr and Samsung 900 series cellphones can be reprogrammed over the air, using methods meant for delivering upgrades and maintenance. It's called "flashing the firmware," said James Atkinson, a consultant for the Granite Island Group in Massachusetts.
"These are very powerful phones, but all that power comes with a price. By allowing ring tones and stock quotes and all this other stuff, you also give someone a way to get into your phones," Atkinson said.
Privacy advocates called such use of roving bugs intrusive and illegal. Webcams and microphones on home computers soon may be fair game for remote-control gumshoes, too, they said.
"This is a kind of surveillance we've never really seen before. The government can and will exploit whatever technology is available to achieve their surveillance goals. This is of particular concern, considering the proliferation of microphones and cameras in the products we own," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Converting cellphones into stealth microphones violates the Fourth Amendment protection against overly broad searches, Bankston said. FBI spokesman James Margolin said the bureau's use of roving bugs is monitored closely by the courts.
"The operative thing for any concerned citizen is, we only do this when we get authorization from the judiciary, when we meet the probable-cause threshold," he said.
Legally, he said, bugging cellphones differs little from placing microphones "in a chair or a wall or behind a picture."
"It's not a situation where we just turn the tape on and we gather everything," Margolin said. "By law, we only listen to what the warrant authorizes us to listen to."
However, hackers probably can pull this off, too, said Lauren Weinstein, who warned of the possibility in 1999 on his online Privacy Forum. "A lot of people know an awful lot about the inner workings of these phones," he said.
The roving bugs came to light last month in an opinion by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York.
Kaplan's opinion, reported online by CNET, upheld FBI bugging of cellphones used by John "Buster" Ardito, allegedly a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family, and his lawyer and associate, Peter Peluso.
A listening device in Ardito's phone "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off, intercepting conversations within its range wherever it happened to be," Kaplan wrote.
Investigators got permission for the bug from another judge in 2003, after learning that Ardito's associates had discovered FBI bugs planted in restaurants where they gathered.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
Margolin declined to say if an eavesdropping device was planted in Ardito's cellphone or if agents remotely programmed the phone for real-time eavesdropping or for recording audio to transmit at specified times.
"For obvious reasons, we don't discuss what we are or are not capable of doing, technologically," Margolin said.
Sprint Nextel spokesman Mark Elliott said the company cooperates with authorities when they have warrants and subpoenas. "In this case, we were not aware of any investigation and were not asked to participate," Elliott said.
Samsung spokesman Jose Cardona said he had not heard of any privacy issues with 900 series phones.
Nextel phones are made by Motorola, which also makes the popular Razr. Motorola spokeswoman Molly Sheehan said the company's phones were not designed or intended to violate privacy rights or laws, "and Motorola neither supports nor condones such use." She referred further questions to the FBI.
While all commercial mobile services can be tapped, Nextel is the easiest because its network uses a technology called TDMA, said the Granite Island Group's Atkinson, who was trained by the government and advises corporations about security.
TDMA conveys a constant audio stream to cell towers. That stream can be monitored surreptitiously with another Nextel phone, Atkinson said.
A walkie-talkie feature has made Nextel popular with businesses. But Atkinson said more convenience can mean less security.
That goes for Nextel-toting FBI agents, too, he said. If they gather in Washington, "I can tell you from a few blocks away where the FBI agents are, and how far apart they're sitting in the building."
Asked if the FBI uses Nextel phones, spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said, "We use a variety of phones and providers."
Atkinson said the only sure way to shield a mobile phone from the prying ears of police, hackers and jealous spouses is to remove the battery. But don't get cocky.
"A smart eavesdropper will bug the battery," he said.
But authorities also can use cellphones to eavesdrop on suspects, even when the devices are off.
The FBI converted the Nextel cellphones of two alleged New York mobsters into "roving bugs," microphones that relayed conversations when the phones seemed to be inactive, according to recent court documents.
Authorities won't reveal how they did this. But a countersurveillance expert said Nextel, Motorola Razr and Samsung 900 series cellphones can be reprogrammed over the air, using methods meant for delivering upgrades and maintenance. It's called "flashing the firmware," said James Atkinson, a consultant for the Granite Island Group in Massachusetts.
"These are very powerful phones, but all that power comes with a price. By allowing ring tones and stock quotes and all this other stuff, you also give someone a way to get into your phones," Atkinson said.
Privacy advocates called such use of roving bugs intrusive and illegal. Webcams and microphones on home computers soon may be fair game for remote-control gumshoes, too, they said.
"This is a kind of surveillance we've never really seen before. The government can and will exploit whatever technology is available to achieve their surveillance goals. This is of particular concern, considering the proliferation of microphones and cameras in the products we own," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Converting cellphones into stealth microphones violates the Fourth Amendment protection against overly broad searches, Bankston said. FBI spokesman James Margolin said the bureau's use of roving bugs is monitored closely by the courts.
"The operative thing for any concerned citizen is, we only do this when we get authorization from the judiciary, when we meet the probable-cause threshold," he said.
Legally, he said, bugging cellphones differs little from placing microphones "in a chair or a wall or behind a picture."
"It's not a situation where we just turn the tape on and we gather everything," Margolin said. "By law, we only listen to what the warrant authorizes us to listen to."
However, hackers probably can pull this off, too, said Lauren Weinstein, who warned of the possibility in 1999 on his online Privacy Forum. "A lot of people know an awful lot about the inner workings of these phones," he said.
The roving bugs came to light last month in an opinion by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York.
Kaplan's opinion, reported online by CNET, upheld FBI bugging of cellphones used by John "Buster" Ardito, allegedly a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family, and his lawyer and associate, Peter Peluso.
A listening device in Ardito's phone "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off, intercepting conversations within its range wherever it happened to be," Kaplan wrote.
Investigators got permission for the bug from another judge in 2003, after learning that Ardito's associates had discovered FBI bugs planted in restaurants where they gathered.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York declined to comment.
Margolin declined to say if an eavesdropping device was planted in Ardito's cellphone or if agents remotely programmed the phone for real-time eavesdropping or for recording audio to transmit at specified times.
"For obvious reasons, we don't discuss what we are or are not capable of doing, technologically," Margolin said.
Sprint Nextel spokesman Mark Elliott said the company cooperates with authorities when they have warrants and subpoenas. "In this case, we were not aware of any investigation and were not asked to participate," Elliott said.
Samsung spokesman Jose Cardona said he had not heard of any privacy issues with 900 series phones.
Nextel phones are made by Motorola, which also makes the popular Razr. Motorola spokeswoman Molly Sheehan said the company's phones were not designed or intended to violate privacy rights or laws, "and Motorola neither supports nor condones such use." She referred further questions to the FBI.
While all commercial mobile services can be tapped, Nextel is the easiest because its network uses a technology called TDMA, said the Granite Island Group's Atkinson, who was trained by the government and advises corporations about security.
TDMA conveys a constant audio stream to cell towers. That stream can be monitored surreptitiously with another Nextel phone, Atkinson said.
A walkie-talkie feature has made Nextel popular with businesses. But Atkinson said more convenience can mean less security.
That goes for Nextel-toting FBI agents, too, he said. If they gather in Washington, "I can tell you from a few blocks away where the FBI agents are, and how far apart they're sitting in the building."
Asked if the FBI uses Nextel phones, spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said, "We use a variety of phones and providers."
Atkinson said the only sure way to shield a mobile phone from the prying ears of police, hackers and jealous spouses is to remove the battery. But don't get cocky.
"A smart eavesdropper will bug the battery," he said.
Assata Shakur honored at CCNY...Whitefolks outraged
These days, Joanne Chesimard is known as Assata Shakur, but she's had dozens of other aliases in a life on the run.
She now lives in Cuba, a guest of dictator Fidel Castro, and carries a $1 million price tag for her capture and return to prison in the U.S.
She's a convicted cop killer who left behind a lifetime of pain for the family of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.
But in at least one corner of City College, Chesimard is a hero, honored and remembered.
Her latest alias enshrines theGuillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community Center at the City University of New York's flagship campus.
It's a punch to the gut that has furious police groups demanding the publicly funded institution strip away the Black Liberation Army militant's name.
"We use tax dollars to support an institution that indemnifies a cold-blooded terrorist?" asked Dave Jones, president of the New Jersey State Troopers Fraternal Association.
"She's a cowardly, cold-blooded convicted murderer who's part of a murdering sect," he said. "She's no different from those people who flew those planes into those towers and destroyed all those innocent lives."
Shakur was sentenced to life for her role in the the 1973 murder of Foerster.
Foerster was shot twice at point-blank range with his own weapon when he pulled over a car carrying Chesimard and other activists on May 2, 1973, on the Jersey Turnpike.
His partner, James Harper, was wounded.
She was freed in a daring 1979 prison break and fled to Cuba. Last year, the feds put her on the terrorist watch list with a $1 million reward for her capture.
The Morales/Shakur Center got its name in 1989, a reward to radical students who took over City College's North Academic Center to protest a proposed tuition hike.
Guillermo Morales was a member of the FALN, a violent group advocating independence for Puerto Rico. He fled to Mexico after breaking out of Bellevue Hospital even after losing his fingers while making a bomb. He now also lives in Cuba.
Today, the center named for Morales and Shakur is shared by three groups - Students for Educational Rights, the Student Liberation Action Movement and Dominicans 2000. CCNY says it has no intention of renaming the center.
A spokeswoman also said the complaints from cops are the first the college has heard.
"This is not the college or the administration's idea of a good name for this room, but we believe the university is a place to discuss and argue ideas, some of which are not widely supported," said school spokeswoman Mary Lou Edmondson.
But police groups said Shakur was not about ideas - she was about killing.
"It's disgusting that an institute of higher learning whose main goal is to educate people would dedicate a room to a person whose main goal in life was to take lives, especially those of people who wear the uniform," said Patrick Lynch, president of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
Students who use the center today were a little fuzzy on who it's named for.
Freshmen Jeimy Gutierrez, 18, and Angela Morel, 17, members of the Student Liberation Action Movement, said they did not know Shakur is a wanted terrorist who killed a New Jersey trooper.
"I'm surprised," said Angela. "I didn't know. I'm going to do some research."
"I'm going to look into it," Gutierrez echoed.
But the center's older advisers know who she is.
Center Director Rodolfo Leyton argues that Shakur was framed.
"The legal system makes mistakes all the time," he said, insisting many black activists were jailed on trumped-up charges.
"She's seen as a hero to most of the people in her community - Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn, wherever people of color are," Leyton said.
The New Jersey State Police said Chesimard is no hero.
"I would hope these college students do the appropriate research in terms of what transpired with regards to the murder of Werner Foerster," said Capt. Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police. "I think if they did, they'd think twice about supporting her. Basically, she's a terrorist."
She now lives in Cuba, a guest of dictator Fidel Castro, and carries a $1 million price tag for her capture and return to prison in the U.S.
She's a convicted cop killer who left behind a lifetime of pain for the family of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.
But in at least one corner of City College, Chesimard is a hero, honored and remembered.
Her latest alias enshrines theGuillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community Center at the City University of New York's flagship campus.
It's a punch to the gut that has furious police groups demanding the publicly funded institution strip away the Black Liberation Army militant's name.
"We use tax dollars to support an institution that indemnifies a cold-blooded terrorist?" asked Dave Jones, president of the New Jersey State Troopers Fraternal Association.
"She's a cowardly, cold-blooded convicted murderer who's part of a murdering sect," he said. "She's no different from those people who flew those planes into those towers and destroyed all those innocent lives."
Shakur was sentenced to life for her role in the the 1973 murder of Foerster.
Foerster was shot twice at point-blank range with his own weapon when he pulled over a car carrying Chesimard and other activists on May 2, 1973, on the Jersey Turnpike.
His partner, James Harper, was wounded.
She was freed in a daring 1979 prison break and fled to Cuba. Last year, the feds put her on the terrorist watch list with a $1 million reward for her capture.
The Morales/Shakur Center got its name in 1989, a reward to radical students who took over City College's North Academic Center to protest a proposed tuition hike.
Guillermo Morales was a member of the FALN, a violent group advocating independence for Puerto Rico. He fled to Mexico after breaking out of Bellevue Hospital even after losing his fingers while making a bomb. He now also lives in Cuba.
Today, the center named for Morales and Shakur is shared by three groups - Students for Educational Rights, the Student Liberation Action Movement and Dominicans 2000. CCNY says it has no intention of renaming the center.
A spokeswoman also said the complaints from cops are the first the college has heard.
"This is not the college or the administration's idea of a good name for this room, but we believe the university is a place to discuss and argue ideas, some of which are not widely supported," said school spokeswoman Mary Lou Edmondson.
But police groups said Shakur was not about ideas - she was about killing.
"It's disgusting that an institute of higher learning whose main goal is to educate people would dedicate a room to a person whose main goal in life was to take lives, especially those of people who wear the uniform," said Patrick Lynch, president of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
Students who use the center today were a little fuzzy on who it's named for.
Freshmen Jeimy Gutierrez, 18, and Angela Morel, 17, members of the Student Liberation Action Movement, said they did not know Shakur is a wanted terrorist who killed a New Jersey trooper.
"I'm surprised," said Angela. "I didn't know. I'm going to do some research."
"I'm going to look into it," Gutierrez echoed.
But the center's older advisers know who she is.
Center Director Rodolfo Leyton argues that Shakur was framed.
"The legal system makes mistakes all the time," he said, insisting many black activists were jailed on trumped-up charges.
"She's seen as a hero to most of the people in her community - Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn, wherever people of color are," Leyton said.
The New Jersey State Police said Chesimard is no hero.
"I would hope these college students do the appropriate research in terms of what transpired with regards to the murder of Werner Foerster," said Capt. Al Della Fave, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Police. "I think if they did, they'd think twice about supporting her. Basically, she's a terrorist."
Teacher Allegedly Tapes Student's Mouth Shut
(AP) BAKERSFIELD, Calif. A high school science teacher was placed on paid leave after allegedly duct-taping a noisy freshman's mouth shut in an incident reportedly captured by students' cell phone cameras.
Bakersfield High School teacher Carol Humphrey was placed on leave last week, district spokesman John Teves said Monday.
A student in Humphrey's class was making a sound by thumping his fingers against his cheeks, Teves said.
The teacher then taped the boy's mouth shut and taped a few of his fingers together, students told officials.
"I think the teacher may have thought this was a humorous way to address it," Teves said. "It was not humorous. Putting hands on a student is not acceptable."
Humphrey, a 35-year veteran of the Kern High School District, has not had any disciplinary problems before and was once voted by students to be the female teacher "Most Like a Parent."
Bakersfield High School teacher Carol Humphrey was placed on leave last week, district spokesman John Teves said Monday.
A student in Humphrey's class was making a sound by thumping his fingers against his cheeks, Teves said.
The teacher then taped the boy's mouth shut and taped a few of his fingers together, students told officials.
"I think the teacher may have thought this was a humorous way to address it," Teves said. "It was not humorous. Putting hands on a student is not acceptable."
Humphrey, a 35-year veteran of the Kern High School District, has not had any disciplinary problems before and was once voted by students to be the female teacher "Most Like a Parent."
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Best thing is there is no lame contract ! I rock the Cingular phone...!
Cheers
Nothing like shooting Osama another great free playable video game
Nothing like shooting Osama another great free playable video game
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Check this game out!
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Game site of the year
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www.bot-games.com
Check this game out!
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Game site of the year
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Illinois teen to be arrested for spiking HS cafeteria salad dressing with his SEMEN
(CBS) WHEATON, Ill. A student at Wheaton North High School is accused in a vulgar case of food tampering. Police say he put his bodily fluid into salad dressing in the school cafeteria.
CBS 2 news partner The Naperville Sun had the tip on the story. CBS 2's West Suburban Bureau Chief Mike Puccinelli reports a letter is going home to parents warning about the possible health hazard.
The student, a senior, is not in school at this time. School officials first learned of the case of food tampering late Tuesday.
At Wheaton North High School the mission is to create self-directed students who make sound decisions. Last week one of those students decided to do the unthinkable when officials say he spiked a container of cafeteria salad dressing with his own semen.
Police say an attempted aggravated battery arrest is imminent.
"An act occurred that could have physically harmed someone at the school, but no one was physically harmed," said Commander Joseph Eversole of the Wheaton Police Department.
Police were called into the investigation by District 200 superintendent Gary Catalani. He did not want to talk on camera and asked us to hold the story so parents would learn what happened in letters that were put in first class mail today.
But students say it's too late, and everyone knows about the incident already.
And everyone is universally repulsed.
"The whole school is disgusted," said senior Brian Corcoran.
"That's got to be the sickest thing I've ever heard in my life," said Nick Anderson, also a senior student.
"It's just pretty gross that someone would actually do that," said senior Edward Lee.
"It's been going on for a month. That's what we've all been hearing," said senior Katie Muir, but school officials say their investigation has shown that it happened just once, last Wednesday.
They say the student admitted he put the semen into a container of ranch dressing in the student commons dining area. And officials have determined that the contents could have been ingested during the last lunch period on Wednesday and during all five lunch periods on Thursday.
The superintendent sought to reassure saying, "We want to make sure every precaution is taken and we're doing that. We've changed protocols with food service containers to ensure this never happens again."
From now on the condiments in all 20 schools in the district will only be available in individual packets or in large containers, making them very difficult to tamper with.
The district notified the DuPage Department of Health, who did not return calls for comment Thursday. Many of the students are concerned, as ingesting semen can spread HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases.
Source: CBS2Chicago
CBS 2 news partner The Naperville Sun had the tip on the story. CBS 2's West Suburban Bureau Chief Mike Puccinelli reports a letter is going home to parents warning about the possible health hazard.
The student, a senior, is not in school at this time. School officials first learned of the case of food tampering late Tuesday.
At Wheaton North High School the mission is to create self-directed students who make sound decisions. Last week one of those students decided to do the unthinkable when officials say he spiked a container of cafeteria salad dressing with his own semen.
Police say an attempted aggravated battery arrest is imminent.
"An act occurred that could have physically harmed someone at the school, but no one was physically harmed," said Commander Joseph Eversole of the Wheaton Police Department.
Police were called into the investigation by District 200 superintendent Gary Catalani. He did not want to talk on camera and asked us to hold the story so parents would learn what happened in letters that were put in first class mail today.
But students say it's too late, and everyone knows about the incident already.
And everyone is universally repulsed.
"The whole school is disgusted," said senior Brian Corcoran.
"That's got to be the sickest thing I've ever heard in my life," said Nick Anderson, also a senior student.
"It's just pretty gross that someone would actually do that," said senior Edward Lee.
"It's been going on for a month. That's what we've all been hearing," said senior Katie Muir, but school officials say their investigation has shown that it happened just once, last Wednesday.
They say the student admitted he put the semen into a container of ranch dressing in the student commons dining area. And officials have determined that the contents could have been ingested during the last lunch period on Wednesday and during all five lunch periods on Thursday.
The superintendent sought to reassure saying, "We want to make sure every precaution is taken and we're doing that. We've changed protocols with food service containers to ensure this never happens again."
From now on the condiments in all 20 schools in the district will only be available in individual packets or in large containers, making them very difficult to tamper with.
The district notified the DuPage Department of Health, who did not return calls for comment Thursday. Many of the students are concerned, as ingesting semen can spread HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases.
Source: CBS2Chicago
Wisconsin hunter hit a deer with 7 legs
FOND DU LAC, Wis. - Rick Lisko hunts deer with a bow but got his most unusual one driving his truck down his mile-long driveway. The young buck had nub antlers — and seven legs. Lisko said it also had both male and female reproductive organs. "It was definitely a freak of nature," Lisko said. "I guess it's a real rarity."
He said he slowed down as the buck and two does ran across the driveway Nov. 22, but the buck ran under the truck and got hit.
When he looked at the animal, he noticed three- to four-inch appendages growing from the rear legs. Later, he found a smaller appendage growing from one of the front legs.
"It's a pretty weird deer," he said, describing the extra legs as resembling "crab pinchers."
"It kind of gives you the creeps when you look at it," he said, but he thought he saw the appendages moving, as if they were functional, before the deer was hit.
Warden Doug Bilgo of the state Department of Natural Resources came to Lisko's property near Mud Lake in the town of Osceola to tag the deer.
"I have never seen anything like that in all the years that I've been working as a game warden and being a hunter myself," Bilgo said. "It wasn't anything grotesque or ugly or anything. It was just unusual that it would have those little appendages growing out like that."
Bilgo took photos and sent information on the animal to DNR wildlife managers.
John Hoffman of Eden Meat Market skinned the deer for Lisko, who wasn't going to waste the venison from the animal.
"And by the way, I did eat it," Lisko said. "It was tasty."
He said he slowed down as the buck and two does ran across the driveway Nov. 22, but the buck ran under the truck and got hit.
When he looked at the animal, he noticed three- to four-inch appendages growing from the rear legs. Later, he found a smaller appendage growing from one of the front legs.
"It's a pretty weird deer," he said, describing the extra legs as resembling "crab pinchers."
"It kind of gives you the creeps when you look at it," he said, but he thought he saw the appendages moving, as if they were functional, before the deer was hit.
Warden Doug Bilgo of the state Department of Natural Resources came to Lisko's property near Mud Lake in the town of Osceola to tag the deer.
"I have never seen anything like that in all the years that I've been working as a game warden and being a hunter myself," Bilgo said. "It wasn't anything grotesque or ugly or anything. It was just unusual that it would have those little appendages growing out like that."
Bilgo took photos and sent information on the animal to DNR wildlife managers.
John Hoffman of Eden Meat Market skinned the deer for Lisko, who wasn't going to waste the venison from the animal.
"And by the way, I did eat it," Lisko said. "It was tasty."
Man kills his daughter because she turned off his Xbox
This was Tyrone Spellman's explanation to police: He "snapped" after he thought his daughter had broken a $600 Xbox game console.
Alayiah Turman was only 17 months old, born March 29, 2005. Spellman beat her to death, prosecutors say.
In an alleged confession read at his preliminary hearing yesterday, Spellman, 25, said he was playing one of Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon" games - a violent combat epic - in a front bedroom of his family's Brewerytown home that Thursday morning, Sept. 7. He had taken Alayiah into the room so her mother, Mia Turman, could rest.
"She pulled the cord and the whole game console fell over," Spellman said in his statement, read by Homicide Detective John Cummings. "I thought it was broken. I popped her in the face. I picked her up and tossed her in a chair."
Later that day - at 12:37 p.m. - Alayiah was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital.
Spellman, also known as Anwar Salahuddin, was held for trial by order of Municipal Court Judge Gerard A. Kosinski on charges of murder, endangering the welfare of a child, and related offenses.
Alayiah's slaying was one of several child deaths examined by The Inquirer in an October article on the city Department of Human Services and its oversight of child-abuse and neglect cases.
DHS visited Spellman's rowhouse on the 1500 block of North 29th Street twice in August - each time seeing only the baby's mother, Mia Turman, 21, and Alayiah, inside. Turman told the agency that no one else lived there.
In September, Cheryl Ransom-Garner, then DHS commissioner, told The Inquirer that a social worker had reported the child looked happy and had no bruises. But Turman's mother, Marvine Turman, told The Inquirer that she had seen bruises on the child.
Yesterday's hearing focused on the injuries Alayiah suffered on the day she died.
In his statement, Spellman said that after he tossed his daughter in a chair, he put her on a bed. He then went to tell Turman, who was eight months pregnant and sleeping in a different bedroom, that he was going to a store to get "something to smoke and something to eat."
When he returned, Spellman said, Keith Walker - identified after the hearing by Spellman's supporters as a tenant in the house - told him that Alayiah "fell and had blood on her nose."
Spellman called 911 while Walker tried to resuscitate her.
Mia Turman testified yesterday, her voice at times nervous, as Spellman stared at her. Turman and Alayiah had moved into Spellman's house about a month before the child's death.
Turman testified that Spellman woke her about noon Sept. 7 and that, when she saw Alayiah, the baby's nose was bleeding, "the side of her face was bruised," and "she wasn't breathing."
Under cross-examination by Spellman's lawyer, Bobby Hoof, Turman agreed that Spellman had told her Alayiah had fallen off a bed and had been found lying on a barbell.
Edwin Lieberman, the city assistant medical examiner who performed Alayiah's autopsy, testified that in addition to bruises around her head, Alayiah suffered "tremendous injury" inside her head "caused by at minimum three separate blows" to the right side, top and back of her skull.
Alayiah's skull was fractured to the point that a piece of bone had fallen out, he said.
When asked by Assistant District Attorney Yvonne Ruiz what could have caused Alayiah's internal head injuries, Lieberman testified that a fist could have caused them or her head could have struck a smooth surface, such as a tabletop, wall or floor.
Under cross-examination, Lieberman dismissed Hoof's suggestions. "A simple fall as you are suggesting from a bed would not cause a skull fracture," he said. Nor, he said, would falling on a weight.
After the hearing, Turman, surrounded by relatives, let off her anger toward Spellman, who she said showed no remorse.
"My baby don't deserve that," she said.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Alayiah Turman was only 17 months old, born March 29, 2005. Spellman beat her to death, prosecutors say.
In an alleged confession read at his preliminary hearing yesterday, Spellman, 25, said he was playing one of Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon" games - a violent combat epic - in a front bedroom of his family's Brewerytown home that Thursday morning, Sept. 7. He had taken Alayiah into the room so her mother, Mia Turman, could rest.
"She pulled the cord and the whole game console fell over," Spellman said in his statement, read by Homicide Detective John Cummings. "I thought it was broken. I popped her in the face. I picked her up and tossed her in a chair."
Later that day - at 12:37 p.m. - Alayiah was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital.
Spellman, also known as Anwar Salahuddin, was held for trial by order of Municipal Court Judge Gerard A. Kosinski on charges of murder, endangering the welfare of a child, and related offenses.
Alayiah's slaying was one of several child deaths examined by The Inquirer in an October article on the city Department of Human Services and its oversight of child-abuse and neglect cases.
DHS visited Spellman's rowhouse on the 1500 block of North 29th Street twice in August - each time seeing only the baby's mother, Mia Turman, 21, and Alayiah, inside. Turman told the agency that no one else lived there.
In September, Cheryl Ransom-Garner, then DHS commissioner, told The Inquirer that a social worker had reported the child looked happy and had no bruises. But Turman's mother, Marvine Turman, told The Inquirer that she had seen bruises on the child.
Yesterday's hearing focused on the injuries Alayiah suffered on the day she died.
In his statement, Spellman said that after he tossed his daughter in a chair, he put her on a bed. He then went to tell Turman, who was eight months pregnant and sleeping in a different bedroom, that he was going to a store to get "something to smoke and something to eat."
When he returned, Spellman said, Keith Walker - identified after the hearing by Spellman's supporters as a tenant in the house - told him that Alayiah "fell and had blood on her nose."
Spellman called 911 while Walker tried to resuscitate her.
Mia Turman testified yesterday, her voice at times nervous, as Spellman stared at her. Turman and Alayiah had moved into Spellman's house about a month before the child's death.
Turman testified that Spellman woke her about noon Sept. 7 and that, when she saw Alayiah, the baby's nose was bleeding, "the side of her face was bruised," and "she wasn't breathing."
Under cross-examination by Spellman's lawyer, Bobby Hoof, Turman agreed that Spellman had told her Alayiah had fallen off a bed and had been found lying on a barbell.
Edwin Lieberman, the city assistant medical examiner who performed Alayiah's autopsy, testified that in addition to bruises around her head, Alayiah suffered "tremendous injury" inside her head "caused by at minimum three separate blows" to the right side, top and back of her skull.
Alayiah's skull was fractured to the point that a piece of bone had fallen out, he said.
When asked by Assistant District Attorney Yvonne Ruiz what could have caused Alayiah's internal head injuries, Lieberman testified that a fist could have caused them or her head could have struck a smooth surface, such as a tabletop, wall or floor.
Under cross-examination, Lieberman dismissed Hoof's suggestions. "A simple fall as you are suggesting from a bed would not cause a skull fracture," he said. Nor, he said, would falling on a weight.
After the hearing, Turman, surrounded by relatives, let off her anger toward Spellman, who she said showed no remorse.
"My baby don't deserve that," she said.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Great myspace Images for the XMAS period and the NEW YEAR MYSPACE
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The New Honda NSX (Exclusive Pictures)
* It will arrive in ’08, together with the introduction of the Acura brand in Japan.
* Honda will give a clear design clue in Detroit in the Acura PR event (that apparently that man has seen).
* V10 powerplant will be a 4.5L, smaller than current BMW’s M5 and the upcoming Lexus V10. They also say that it would have a V angle of 95º, similar to F1 engines, and that for that reason the body will have to be wider. It should reach around 120PS/L with max output of 550Hp. Power is said to come to the wheels through a Semi-AT transmission
* Platform is said to be a newly developed FR+SH-AWD setup, together with a new suspension design, and inheriting an all aluminium body construction from past-gen NSX.
* Style is said to be more in the line of British GT’s than Italian Ferraris. According to the source, he can’t really find similarities with other cars on the road, although he says that you could say it’s a Honda (Acura), but that you couldn’t think of it as a NSX successor.
* Price would be in line with past-gen NSX (priced around 10 – 12 Million yen), which would be considerably cheaper than Lexus targeted price of 15-20 MYen for their GT-car
HOT rating site - New Girls added
Check out this new rating site www.sexyornot.us
It has some of the hottest people I have ever seen. Check out these two girls. I think they are in the top ten.
It has some of the hottest people I have ever seen. Check out these two girls. I think they are in the top ten.
SEO information for webmasters
Basic On-Page Organic Search Engine Optimization
Header of the HTML Document:
1 )Title Tag – 8 to 10 words, most important keywords first. Must be relevant to page, readable and keyword rich. Focus on 1-3 concepts and no more.
2 )Meta Description Tag – 20 to 25 words with most important keywords first. Must be relevant to page, readable and keyword rich. Focus on 1-3 concepts and no more. It should be an elaboration of the Title tag.
3 )Meta Keyword Tag – 1 to 40+ keywords in a comma delimited list. These phrases should exist in the title, or on the page. Most important phrases first. Misspellings should be included here, even if no on the viewable page.
4 )JavaScript and CSS – Put them in external files to reduce the amount of data the search engine spider has to go through before arriving at the on-page text.
Viewable Page
1 )Most important keywords should be placed high up on the viewable page. Ideally a tag is used to determine a page or paragraph heading. Search engines do not recognize CSS defined font sizes the same as tags.
Header of the HTML Document:
1 )Title Tag – 8 to 10 words, most important keywords first. Must be relevant to page, readable and keyword rich. Focus on 1-3 concepts and no more.
2 )Meta Description Tag – 20 to 25 words with most important keywords first. Must be relevant to page, readable and keyword rich. Focus on 1-3 concepts and no more. It should be an elaboration of the Title tag.
3 )Meta Keyword Tag – 1 to 40+ keywords in a comma delimited list. These phrases should exist in the title, or on the page. Most important phrases first. Misspellings should be included here, even if no on the viewable page.
4 )JavaScript and CSS – Put them in external files to reduce the amount of data the search engine spider has to go through before arriving at the on-page text.
Viewable Page
1 )Most important keywords should be placed high up on the viewable page. Ideally a
tags.
2 )Logo – Should always link to the site home page and include an alt tag with the site’s most important keyword phrase.
Text – The following example works well particularly on engines like Google.
1 )Paragraph Heading (keyword rich, bold and linked to a detail page)
2 )Most important keyword concept followed by supporting concepts with an occasional link to a supporting detail, example, case study, product, testimonial, press release, glossary or newsletter page. Google uses snippets from the page, so be sure to include related keywords near your target keywords in paragraphs.
3 )Image Alt text – These are most useful for SEO when the alt text is meaningful for the page being linked to. Alt text: “red ducks” which links to the page, red-ducks.htm and where “Red Ducks” is in the Title tag, the page heading, Meta tags, on-page text, etc.. Keep it simple. Do NOT stuff multiple keyword concepts into an image Alt attribute.
4 )Internal Links – Search engine spiders do not generally follow JavaScript links used in mouseovers or links in image maps. They do not follow links from dropdown menus. Use plain text links. Appearance can be modified through CSS. Placing a few keyword rich text links in the footer of each page can also build internal link popularity.
5 )Site map - Link to a site map page from your home page and from other pages. The site map is a collection of static text links to all other pages of your web site. Do not place more than 100 links on any one page. More info on site maps.
6 )Validate - Search engine spiders may not index a page fully or at all if it encounters certain types of HTML errors. Run your pages through an HTML validator such as http://validator.w3.org/
7 )Link Building - On page keyword optimization and inclusion in a search engine’s database used to be sufficient for high ranking on competitive phrases. Do not underestimate the need for one way links into your site from authoritative sites. Quality is more important than quantity, although they are both important. Link building is an ongoing task that you should allocate time to in proportion to the aggressiveness of your campaign and competitiveness of your category.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Jada Pinkett Smith Gives $1 Million, Asks To Rename School After Tupac
Actress Jada Pinkett Smith has given an early Christmas present to students and faculty at Smith's alma mater, the Baltimore School for Arts.
Smith donated $1 million to the high school from which she graduated and started her successful acting career. It is the largest cash gift ever from a gradaute of the performing arts school.
The Baltimore School for the Arts announced the donation for renovation and further expansion on Monday, and wanted to name its new theater for her. Smith declined and asked that the theater be dedicated to murdered rapper Tupac Shakur, a fellow classmate.
The donation is from the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, based in Baltimore. Previously they had given $112,500 to the school reported the Baltimore Sun.
When the expansion program is finished, the school plans to increase enrollment and instrumental music production programs.
"It means a lot when you're a teacher and your most famous alumnus comes back to give a donation," said Donald Hicken, head of the school's theater department since its founding in 1980 and Pinkett Smith's former theater teacher. "It really says a lot to the community that the school matters in people's lives."
Karen Banfield Evans, the executive director of the Smith Family Foundation and Smith's aunt, said Jada was moved by the school's advances since she graduated in 1989.
"She credits the School for the Arts for really giving her her start and was impressed by the things they've been doing and the way they've grown," Evans said. "When they came up with this (expansion campaign) and all they're doing, she felt like this is what she needed to do." Reported the Baltimore Examiner.
Smith donated $1 million to the high school from which she graduated and started her successful acting career. It is the largest cash gift ever from a gradaute of the performing arts school.
The Baltimore School for the Arts announced the donation for renovation and further expansion on Monday, and wanted to name its new theater for her. Smith declined and asked that the theater be dedicated to murdered rapper Tupac Shakur, a fellow classmate.
The donation is from the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, based in Baltimore. Previously they had given $112,500 to the school reported the Baltimore Sun.
When the expansion program is finished, the school plans to increase enrollment and instrumental music production programs.
"It means a lot when you're a teacher and your most famous alumnus comes back to give a donation," said Donald Hicken, head of the school's theater department since its founding in 1980 and Pinkett Smith's former theater teacher. "It really says a lot to the community that the school matters in people's lives."
Karen Banfield Evans, the executive director of the Smith Family Foundation and Smith's aunt, said Jada was moved by the school's advances since she graduated in 1989.
"She credits the School for the Arts for really giving her her start and was impressed by the things they've been doing and the way they've grown," Evans said. "When they came up with this (expansion campaign) and all they're doing, she felt like this is what she needed to do." Reported the Baltimore Examiner.
Black Women And Girls Raped By White Men With KKK Affiliation
Accused rapists have ties to KKK, investigators say
(Manning) July 10, 2006 - Investigators now say the alleged sexual assault and stabbing of a teenage girl in Manning was a hate crime.
Jeremy Sweat and Dustin Evans are charged with raping and stabbing a 15-year-old girl one week ago.
Sweat and Evans are white. The alleged victim is black.
The sheriff says officers believe Sweat and Evans targeted her because of her race, and may have been targeting any African-American woman.
As a teenager, investigators say Jeremy Sweat liked the Ku Klux Klan.
Deputies showed News 10 a report from a camp for troubled teens in Louisiana, stating he "frequently makes references to his involvement in the KKK."
The 1997 report also said Sweat "threatens to kill specific staff members."
Since moving to Clarendon County a year ago, deputies believe Sweat's violent feelings grew.
"He doesn't make references to the KKK, but he does make references to the lack of value he places on the young woman's life. Basically he said, she's just a black whore-- no one's going to care about her," says Tommie Burgess.
Lieutenant Tommie Burgess says officers also believe Sweat and Evans raped a black woman from Summerton last month.
Both women said the men talked about killing them.
"The first victim ... They talked about throwing her to the alligators ... The second one, they discussed tying blocks to her legs and throwing her in the lake," Burgess says.
Investigators believe Sweat and Evans may have approached more black women. A group of girls told deputies the men came up to them at this Waffle House, and asked if they wanted to go to their house and drink beer. The girls said no.
As of Monday night, both men remained in jail after a judge denied bond.
Charges, background and timeline
21-year-old Dustin L. Evans was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and assault and battery with intent to kill. He was taken into custody without incident at approximately 9:05 Thursday morning at his mother's home in Manning. He's now at the Clarendon County jail.
Evans' wife says he'd been gone for three days, but gave up, saying he couldn't run anymore. "All he could do was cry. Like he was just really scared. He let them handcuff him. He didn't try to fight."
24-year-old Jeremy Shay Sweat was arrested last Monday afternoon and faces the same charges.
Investigators say inside the mobile home, the victim was choked and had her neck cut with a knife before she was repeatedly raped by the two men.
They then forced her into a shower, told her to turn around and began stabbing her. The teenager fell into the bathtub and played dead.
She played dead and overheard the men talking about getting some trash bags and dumping her body in a lake. That's when her attackers left.
Then she ran away, climbing over the back fence to get help next door. Oather Webster tells what happened next, "I could hear somebody stumbling and banging on the wall as they were going down the porch."
The girl was soaked in blood and pounding on Webster's house, begging to be let in, "I had this blood-soaked figure come bolting in the house."
"She was starting to go into shock. I'm assuming from loss of blood. I mean the amount of blood that she had left on the walls and the spot where she had sat in my dining area, was tremendous."
A sheriff's spokesman says the victim is recovering from her wounds, and doing well. Authorities said Thursday she has been released from the hospital.
The case will be prosecuted by the 3rd Circuit Solicitor's Office. As always, officials stress all defendants are innocent until proven guilty.
That's important to Evans' wife Crystal. Two years ago, Dustin Evans was a proud new father of his first child with Crystal, who's now pregnant with the couple's second baby. "He was a gentle guy. I mean he'll appear to be kind of rough to people, but he's really gentle. I mean, because of the tattoos and his body build, I mean he appears to look rough, but he's just always been real gentle."
Investigators say they have also linked Sweat and Evans to the rape of a 45-year-old Summerton woman June 20th. She was also black.
(Manning) July 10, 2006 - Investigators now say the alleged sexual assault and stabbing of a teenage girl in Manning was a hate crime.
Jeremy Sweat and Dustin Evans are charged with raping and stabbing a 15-year-old girl one week ago.
Sweat and Evans are white. The alleged victim is black.
The sheriff says officers believe Sweat and Evans targeted her because of her race, and may have been targeting any African-American woman.
As a teenager, investigators say Jeremy Sweat liked the Ku Klux Klan.
Deputies showed News 10 a report from a camp for troubled teens in Louisiana, stating he "frequently makes references to his involvement in the KKK."
The 1997 report also said Sweat "threatens to kill specific staff members."
Since moving to Clarendon County a year ago, deputies believe Sweat's violent feelings grew.
"He doesn't make references to the KKK, but he does make references to the lack of value he places on the young woman's life. Basically he said, she's just a black whore-- no one's going to care about her," says Tommie Burgess.
Lieutenant Tommie Burgess says officers also believe Sweat and Evans raped a black woman from Summerton last month.
Both women said the men talked about killing them.
"The first victim ... They talked about throwing her to the alligators ... The second one, they discussed tying blocks to her legs and throwing her in the lake," Burgess says.
Investigators believe Sweat and Evans may have approached more black women. A group of girls told deputies the men came up to them at this Waffle House, and asked if they wanted to go to their house and drink beer. The girls said no.
As of Monday night, both men remained in jail after a judge denied bond.
Charges, background and timeline
21-year-old Dustin L. Evans was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and assault and battery with intent to kill. He was taken into custody without incident at approximately 9:05 Thursday morning at his mother's home in Manning. He's now at the Clarendon County jail.
Evans' wife says he'd been gone for three days, but gave up, saying he couldn't run anymore. "All he could do was cry. Like he was just really scared. He let them handcuff him. He didn't try to fight."
24-year-old Jeremy Shay Sweat was arrested last Monday afternoon and faces the same charges.
Investigators say inside the mobile home, the victim was choked and had her neck cut with a knife before she was repeatedly raped by the two men.
They then forced her into a shower, told her to turn around and began stabbing her. The teenager fell into the bathtub and played dead.
She played dead and overheard the men talking about getting some trash bags and dumping her body in a lake. That's when her attackers left.
Then she ran away, climbing over the back fence to get help next door. Oather Webster tells what happened next, "I could hear somebody stumbling and banging on the wall as they were going down the porch."
The girl was soaked in blood and pounding on Webster's house, begging to be let in, "I had this blood-soaked figure come bolting in the house."
"She was starting to go into shock. I'm assuming from loss of blood. I mean the amount of blood that she had left on the walls and the spot where she had sat in my dining area, was tremendous."
A sheriff's spokesman says the victim is recovering from her wounds, and doing well. Authorities said Thursday she has been released from the hospital.
The case will be prosecuted by the 3rd Circuit Solicitor's Office. As always, officials stress all defendants are innocent until proven guilty.
That's important to Evans' wife Crystal. Two years ago, Dustin Evans was a proud new father of his first child with Crystal, who's now pregnant with the couple's second baby. "He was a gentle guy. I mean he'll appear to be kind of rough to people, but he's really gentle. I mean, because of the tattoos and his body build, I mean he appears to look rough, but he's just always been real gentle."
Investigators say they have also linked Sweat and Evans to the rape of a 45-year-old Summerton woman June 20th. She was also black.
US Gov BioWeapons Legislator Says 2001 Anthrax Attacks Part Of Government Bio-WarProg
US Government Biological Weapons Legislator Says 2001 Anthrax Attacks Part Of Government Bio-warfare Program
Expert says FBI covered up the plot to attack Congress which may have been perpetrated by the same people who carried out the 9/11 attacks
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The real culprits behind the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress were most likely US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab according to a former government biological weapons legislator and University of Illinois Professor.
Dr Franics A. Boyle says the FBI covered up these facts and has also quite clearly stated that he doubts the official government story that 19 arabs with boxcutters perpetrated the attacks of 9/11.
Boyle is a leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia- Herzegovina at the World Court. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.
"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government bio-warfare program," Boyle says in his new book Biowarfare and Terrorism.
Only a "handful" of scientists had the means to carry out the attack, yet the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens. Boyle states that only top level scientists with access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax could have carried out the attacks.
"The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" , Boyle said. However, impartial scientists were not allowed to perform genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.) in late 2001.
We have previously exposed how leading members of the Bush administration and White House staff were on the anthrax-treating antibiotic Cipro up to six weeks before the attacks occurred. It is also documented that the anthrax strain used was military grade. This was widely reported in 2002 in publications such as the New Scientist. However, this fact has recently been totally changed with the FBI now suggesting that common anthrax, not military grade anthrax was used.
The whole thing "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI." according to Dr Boyle.
Boyle goes on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people? Could it truly be coincidental that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?"
Clearly Dr Boyle has a hard time believing what the government says happened on 9/11.
The anthrax attacks cleverly (or coincidentally if you choose to believe) coincided with the terrorist atrocities and sent Congress into shut down for days. Immediately after re-convening the liberty smashing PATRIOT Act was passed without even being read by members.
In addition, the Bush administration moved to begin planning a major $10 billion expansion of the bioweapons labs at Fort Detrick. Residents in the area have fiercely campaigned against the expansion.
In a forward to Boyle's book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, says the government's "growing bioterror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."
Those who cannot fathom how or why the government could kill almost 3000 citizens, including police and firefighters, on 9/11 need look no further than the anthrax attacks, which provide solid proof that criminal elements within the structure of authority are in operation and don't give a damn about who they kill to achieve their goals of social control.
There are countless examples of the US government having illegally tested and used bio-weapons on its own citizens. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, The Program F fluoride study, Project SHAD which we are now learning used live toxins and chemical poisons on American servicemen on American soil, spraying clouds of bacteria over San Francisco, releasing toxic gases into the New York subway, holding open-air biological and chemical weapons tests in at least four states in the 1960s, the list goes on.
The Pentagon's biowarfare program has long been in operation and US citizens have never been spared from experimentation. To get more of a taste for just how hideous the secret biowarfare program is, click here and go to Rense.com, which has a lengthy (but by no means a comprehensive) list of previous known bio-experiments conducted on the population by the criminal elite.
Expert says FBI covered up the plot to attack Congress which may have been perpetrated by the same people who carried out the 9/11 attacks
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The real culprits behind the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress were most likely US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab according to a former government biological weapons legislator and University of Illinois Professor.
Dr Franics A. Boyle says the FBI covered up these facts and has also quite clearly stated that he doubts the official government story that 19 arabs with boxcutters perpetrated the attacks of 9/11.
Boyle is a leading American professor, practitioner and advocate of international law. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, the American implementing legislation for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-1992), and represented Bosnia- Herzegovina at the World Court. Professor Boyle teaches international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign. He holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science, both from Harvard University.
"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government bio-warfare program," Boyle says in his new book Biowarfare and Terrorism.
Only a "handful" of scientists had the means to carry out the attack, yet the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens. Boyle states that only top level scientists with access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax could have carried out the attacks.
"The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" , Boyle said. However, impartial scientists were not allowed to perform genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.) in late 2001.
We have previously exposed how leading members of the Bush administration and White House staff were on the anthrax-treating antibiotic Cipro up to six weeks before the attacks occurred. It is also documented that the anthrax strain used was military grade. This was widely reported in 2002 in publications such as the New Scientist. However, this fact has recently been totally changed with the FBI now suggesting that common anthrax, not military grade anthrax was used.
The whole thing "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI." according to Dr Boyle.
Boyle goes on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people? Could it truly be coincidental that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?"
Clearly Dr Boyle has a hard time believing what the government says happened on 9/11.
The anthrax attacks cleverly (or coincidentally if you choose to believe) coincided with the terrorist atrocities and sent Congress into shut down for days. Immediately after re-convening the liberty smashing PATRIOT Act was passed without even being read by members.
In addition, the Bush administration moved to begin planning a major $10 billion expansion of the bioweapons labs at Fort Detrick. Residents in the area have fiercely campaigned against the expansion.
In a forward to Boyle's book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, says the government's "growing bioterror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."
Those who cannot fathom how or why the government could kill almost 3000 citizens, including police and firefighters, on 9/11 need look no further than the anthrax attacks, which provide solid proof that criminal elements within the structure of authority are in operation and don't give a damn about who they kill to achieve their goals of social control.
There are countless examples of the US government having illegally tested and used bio-weapons on its own citizens. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, The Program F fluoride study, Project SHAD which we are now learning used live toxins and chemical poisons on American servicemen on American soil, spraying clouds of bacteria over San Francisco, releasing toxic gases into the New York subway, holding open-air biological and chemical weapons tests in at least four states in the 1960s, the list goes on.
The Pentagon's biowarfare program has long been in operation and US citizens have never been spared from experimentation. To get more of a taste for just how hideous the secret biowarfare program is, click here and go to Rense.com, which has a lengthy (but by no means a comprehensive) list of previous known bio-experiments conducted on the population by the criminal elite.
Beyonce does a near "nipplegate" (Pictures inside)
Beyonce Knowles may have wanted her entrance at the premiere to of her new movie 'Dreamgirls' to be a dream itself, but what it actually turned out be, was a nightmare for the singer.
The 'Bootylicious' looked like a dream when she stepped out onto the red-carpet clad in a low-backed gown of blue lace and crinoline, and tied up with a big bow.
Unfortunately for the star, her gown not only happened a bit more see through that she might have thought, but it also slipped south without warning, and revealed a little bit more of the singer's curves than she might have intended, reports the Daily Mail.
The slip also had people wondering whether or not Beyonce had gone under the knife to get her curves enhanced.
'Dreamgirls', which also stars Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose, Keith Robinson and Jennifer Hudson, is the film adaptation of the hit 1981 Broadway musical about a 1960s singing group loosely based on Motown all-female group The Supremes.
Scheduled for a December 25 release, the movie has already gotten the approval of critics, with several of them proclaiming it to be among the year's best and a potential Oscar competitor.
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DICTIONARY FOR WOMEN'S PERSONAL ADS :
40-ish - 49
Adventurous - Slept with everyone
Athletic - No tits
Average looking - Ugly
Beautiful - Pathological liar
Contagious Smile - Does a lot of pills
Emotionally secure - On medication
Feminist - Fat
Free spirit - Junkie
Friendship first - Former very *friendly* person
Fun - Annoying
New Age - Body hair in the wrong places
Open-minded - Desperate
Outgoing - Loud and Embarrassing
Passionate - Sloppy drunk
Professional - Bitch
Voluptuous - Very Fat
Large frame - Hugely Fat
Wants Soul mate - Stalker
WOMEN'S ENGLISH:
1. Yes = No
2. No = Yes
3. Maybe = No
4. We need = I want
5. I am sorry = you'll be sorry
6. We need to talk = you're in trouble
7. Sure, go ahead = you better not
8. Do what you want = you will pay for this later
9. I am not upset = Of course I am upset, you moron!
10. You're very attentive tonight = is sex all you ever think about?
MEN'S ENGLISH :
1. I am hungry = I am hungry
2. I am sleepy = I am sleepy
3. I am tired = I am tired
4. Nice dress = Nice cleavage!
5. I love you = let's have sex now
6. I am bored = Do you want to have sex?
7. May I have this dance? = I'd like to have sex with you
8. Can I call you sometime? = I'd like to have sex with you
9. Do you want to go to a movie? = I'd like to have sex with you
10. Can I take you out to dinner? = I'd like to have sex with you
11. Those shoes don't go with that outfit = I'm gay
And finally.....
A recent scientific study found that women find different male faces attractive depending on where
they are in their menstrual cycle For example, when a woman is ovulating she will prefer a man with
rugged, masculine features. However when she is menstruating, she prefers a man doused in petrol
and set on fire, with scissors stuck in his eye and a cricket stump shoved up his backside
Adventurous - Slept with everyone
Athletic - No tits
Average looking - Ugly
Beautiful - Pathological liar
Contagious Smile - Does a lot of pills
Emotionally secure - On medication
Feminist - Fat
Free spirit - Junkie
Friendship first - Former very *friendly* person
Fun - Annoying
New Age - Body hair in the wrong places
Open-minded - Desperate
Outgoing - Loud and Embarrassing
Passionate - Sloppy drunk
Professional - Bitch
Voluptuous - Very Fat
Large frame - Hugely Fat
Wants Soul mate - Stalker
WOMEN'S ENGLISH:
1. Yes = No
2. No = Yes
3. Maybe = No
4. We need = I want
5. I am sorry = you'll be sorry
6. We need to talk = you're in trouble
7. Sure, go ahead = you better not
8. Do what you want = you will pay for this later
9. I am not upset = Of course I am upset, you moron!
10. You're very attentive tonight = is sex all you ever think about?
MEN'S ENGLISH :
1. I am hungry = I am hungry
2. I am sleepy = I am sleepy
3. I am tired = I am tired
4. Nice dress = Nice cleavage!
5. I love you = let's have sex now
6. I am bored = Do you want to have sex?
7. May I have this dance? = I'd like to have sex with you
8. Can I call you sometime? = I'd like to have sex with you
9. Do you want to go to a movie? = I'd like to have sex with you
10. Can I take you out to dinner? = I'd like to have sex with you
11. Those shoes don't go with that outfit = I'm gay
And finally.....
A recent scientific study found that women find different male faces attractive depending on where
they are in their menstrual cycle For example, when a woman is ovulating she will prefer a man with
rugged, masculine features. However when she is menstruating, she prefers a man doused in petrol
and set on fire, with scissors stuck in his eye and a cricket stump shoved up his backside
Teen Fatally Shoots Self at School
An 11th-grader despondent that his parents might curtail his after-school activities because of poor grades took a rifle to school Tuesday and killed himself between classes in a hallway, authorities said.
The gunman, Shane Joseph Halligan, 16, had no intention of hurting anyone else in the 9 a.m. shooting at Springfield Township High School, Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. said.
Halligan was an Eagle Scout and a volunteer firefighter whose poor grades had led his parents on Monday to threaten to cut back on his after-school activities, Castor said.
"The picture that's emerging is he was despondent over (the fact) his grades are down, his parents are taking appropriate steps to limit extracurricular activities to get the grades up, and he saw the things that he felt were important in his life being taken from him," Castor said.
The boy pledged to get his grades back up.
On Tuesday morning, he ate breakfast with his family. At some point, he retrieved the rifle from a locked cabinet and found high-powered ammunition in the basement, Castor said.
The boy fired shots into the ceiling in the science-wing hallway after first period, said Michael Delaurentis, who was about 30 feet away.
"I was walking to my class," said Delaurentis, who turned 18 on Tuesday. "I just hear 'Get down.' I heard shots fired into the ceiling and I saw smoke."
A security camera showed the boy taking the gun out of bag and shooting into the ceiling, said Randall D. Hummel, the township police chief. Students in the hallway scrambled for cover, and the teenager walked to another hallway out of view, then shot himself, Hummel said.
It was an "apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," Hummel said. Halligan left a note for his family, but authorities did not disclose its contents.
The township police station is next door to the high school and officers were on the scene almost immediately.
Officers in the building heard a single shot and found the boy dead in the hallway, Hummel said.
Halligan's father talked briefly to reporters outside the family's home Tuesday.
"We see this on the news and wonder how it could happen. It doesn't happen in our family," John Halligan said, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I'm at a loss."
The other students were evacuated to an adjacent middle school, and all the district's schools were locked down, said Laura Feller, a spokeswoman for the Springfield Township School District. Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children.
Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested on suspicion of bringing in a loaded gun.
Superintendent Roseann Nyiri said officials considered installing metal detectors after that but felt it was an isolated incident. Instead, they decided they would try to screen for children who are potentially at risk and try to work with them.
"We're all very much aware that even metal detectors have not deterred students from bringing guns into schools in the past," Hummel said.
Delaurentis' father, Michael, said: "It just makes you a little in fear of the future, and not just at this school, any school, because I don't think any school is 100 percent secure."
The gunman, Shane Joseph Halligan, 16, had no intention of hurting anyone else in the 9 a.m. shooting at Springfield Township High School, Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. said.
Halligan was an Eagle Scout and a volunteer firefighter whose poor grades had led his parents on Monday to threaten to cut back on his after-school activities, Castor said.
"The picture that's emerging is he was despondent over (the fact) his grades are down, his parents are taking appropriate steps to limit extracurricular activities to get the grades up, and he saw the things that he felt were important in his life being taken from him," Castor said.
The boy pledged to get his grades back up.
On Tuesday morning, he ate breakfast with his family. At some point, he retrieved the rifle from a locked cabinet and found high-powered ammunition in the basement, Castor said.
The boy fired shots into the ceiling in the science-wing hallway after first period, said Michael Delaurentis, who was about 30 feet away.
"I was walking to my class," said Delaurentis, who turned 18 on Tuesday. "I just hear 'Get down.' I heard shots fired into the ceiling and I saw smoke."
A security camera showed the boy taking the gun out of bag and shooting into the ceiling, said Randall D. Hummel, the township police chief. Students in the hallway scrambled for cover, and the teenager walked to another hallway out of view, then shot himself, Hummel said.
It was an "apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," Hummel said. Halligan left a note for his family, but authorities did not disclose its contents.
The township police station is next door to the high school and officers were on the scene almost immediately.
Officers in the building heard a single shot and found the boy dead in the hallway, Hummel said.
Halligan's father talked briefly to reporters outside the family's home Tuesday.
"We see this on the news and wonder how it could happen. It doesn't happen in our family," John Halligan said, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I'm at a loss."
The other students were evacuated to an adjacent middle school, and all the district's schools were locked down, said Laura Feller, a spokeswoman for the Springfield Township School District. Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children.
Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested on suspicion of bringing in a loaded gun.
Superintendent Roseann Nyiri said officials considered installing metal detectors after that but felt it was an isolated incident. Instead, they decided they would try to screen for children who are potentially at risk and try to work with them.
"We're all very much aware that even metal detectors have not deterred students from bringing guns into schools in the past," Hummel said.
Delaurentis' father, Michael, said: "It just makes you a little in fear of the future, and not just at this school, any school, because I don't think any school is 100 percent secure."
White Girls Beaten by Black Youths
LONG BEACH - A 21-year-old woman who had a dozen bones on one side of her face shattered during a Halloween attack testified in court Friday, recalling the beating in chilling detail.
The victim - who asked the Press-Telegram in previous interviews to be identified by only her first name, Loren, out of concern for her safety - was with two friends visiting a haunted house in Bixby Knolls when the three white women were attacked by a group of black youths.
She appeared composed and confident while on the witness stand. The only moment that revealed any nervousness came as she stood next to a diagram where she was asked to note her position and the position of her friends and the attackers at the time of the beating.
As Deputy District Attorney Andrea Bouas and several defense attorneys stopped for a brief discussion, Loren nervously capped and uncapped a red marker as she waited for the prosecutor's questions to resume.
Loren's mother said outside court that the 21-year-old victim was horribly nervous about testifying, having never done it before.
Her daughter is also struggling with her extensive injuries, she said. A team of doctors, including two surgeons, are trying to determine how best to treat her dizzy spells and her drooping eye.
Several of her teeth have died and will have to be replaced with a partial plate. No one yet knows if she will regain the sight partially lost in the one eye.
She is studying photography, and her injuries forced her to drop all her college classes this year. Her injuries could destroy her dreams of pursuing a career as a professional photographer.
Loren was perhaps the most seriously hurt the night of the attack, which resulted in the arrest of 10 Long Beach youths - 9 girls and one boy, ages 12 to 19 - within moments of the 9:30 p.m. beating.
A few days later, police arrested two 17-year-old males, both from Long Beach. They have been charged with the same counts for which the 10 minors are currently being tried, or adjudicated as it is called in juvenile court.
The charge includes three felony counts of assault by any means of force to produce great bodily injury. Eight of the 10 minors currently in court had a hate crime enhancement added to their charges, and the two 17-year-old boys - whose adjudications are set for early January - also face the hate crime allegation.
All of the minors are black, and witness statements that the youths shouted racial slurs while beating the three victims have resulted in community and nationwide outrage.
Court proceedings so far have been slow, due in part to the difficulty of transporting the 10 minors to the Long Beach courthouse from various Los Angeles County juvenile detention centers.
Each minor has his or her own attorney, to avoid a conflict of interest, making for drawn-out arguments at times.
Friday's session, scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m., started late after the prosecutor argued defense lawyers had violated Superior Court Judge Gibson Lee's order the previous day.
On Thursday, defense attorneys told reporters they changed the seating of the defendants. Until then, all the minors had sat directly behind their attorneys.
When the district attorney asked the first witness to take the stand to identify the minors in court Thursday, she matched the wrong police photograph to one of the girls in court.
Defense attorneys seized on the mistake. During cross examination the witness admitted the error, saying she could not see all of the defendants and therefore picked the wrong one. After further prompting, she said she based her identification the night of the arrest largely on what the minors were wearing, not their facial features.
Prior to the start of testimony Friday, Bouas argued that the defense attorneys had talked about moving the defendants but were told by the judge not to, according to bailiffs and officers in the closed courtroom.
The minors were rearranged anyway and Bouas accused the defense of running a "shell game," officers said.
Many of the defense attorneys became angry at the accusation, the officers said. They told the judge they did not know how the youths had been rearranged, but agreed to have the minors seated behind their assigned lawyer from now on.
"The judge stopped short of saying they violated an order," one officer said. "But he made it clear that it would not happen again."
All the officers spoke on condition of anonymity.
Once that matter was settled, the public was allowed into the courtroom and Bouas began with Loren's testimony.
Loren described how she and her friends began the night at her house, where they dressed in their costumes - she as Betty Boop, her friend Michelle as a pirate and her friend Laura as a vampire.
They had decided to go see the haunted house, located on Linden Avenue at the corner of Bixby Road, while they were waiting for a fourth friend to get off work. That was when they were all going to go to a costume party, she said.
When she and her friends arrived at the haunted house, she said, a young black male - whom she estimated to be 17 to 19 years old - was standing with a group of youths and began hollering "Are you with it?" at her and her friends while grabbing his crotch.
After the victims made their way through the haunted house and returned to the front yard where they had started, she noticed the crowd had grown larger and included girls and boys.
"He said, `Are you with it?' again," Loren testified. "He was loud, he was yelling."
The crowd was also getting louder and more boisterous and the victims could hear other things, she said.
"I heard them (say) something about the white people and `white b---."' Loren testified.
She described trying to walk away and being pelted with pumpkins and lemons. She was hit in the back of the head and in her back. The force was strong enough to cause pain, she recalled.
She also recalled seeing one of her friends - Laura - get hit in the back and in the legs. That is when her friend turned around and told the crowd to stop.
As Laura turned back toward Loren and Michelle, she said, she saw at least two girls grab that friend by her long hair and her dress and yank her backward.
"I heard one voice say, `I f------ hate white people,"' Loren testified.
It was a male voice that shouted the statement, loud enough to be heard over the shouting crowd, she said.
At about the same time she said she heard male and female voices saying, "white b---," and the group surged toward Laura, partially surrounding her friend and cutting off her access to Michelle and Loren.
Loren recalled yelling to Michelle that they were getting separated. Michelle was shouting back that she was calling 911 as she dialed her cell phone.
The victim described, and was asked to demonstrate, how her friend was knocked to the ground. Loren then recalled seeing a young man flip a skateboard he had at his side up over his head.
"I saw him flip it up and swing in the direction of Laura," she testified, describing the suspect as black, tall and with a medium build, adding that he was big but not overweight.
His hair was close to his head, in either braids or corn rows, she added.
Loren said she rushed back to Laura but was quickly surrounded by a group of about a dozen people, mostly girls. They circled her in two rows, one inside the other, she described.
She first felt someone kick the back of her leg, just below her knee, and her leg buckled. But she did not fall, the victim testified.
Punches to her face and the back of her head rained down on her, with more than one person hitting her and most of them girls, she said.
She felt her left cheek pop from the force of one extremely strong blow and assumed it was from a male.
She said she ducked her face and flailed her arms, trying to stop her attackers, but they continued beating her.
"I could feel the rhythm of one-two ... getting punched in the back of the head and the face," she recalled.
She was eventually knocked to the ground when she tried to flip open her cell phone to call for help, and it was knocked out of her hand, she said.
Many of them were girls, she said. Some were wearing sweaters with the Rocawear logo, several had braids and some wore hoop earrings, Loren testified.
Rocawear is a popular line of clothing created by rapper Jay-Z.
Curled in a ball on her knees, Loren said she wrapped her arms over her head and kept her legs tucked under her body. She could feel people pounding her with their fists and kicking her, striking her on top of her head, around her face, her back and up and down her body, she said.
"Once I hit the ground, I remember being kicked by what I thought was a man," she testified. "Because the force was so hard, and when I looked up I thought I could see ... male legs."
At one point, she peered out from under her arm and said she could see one of her friends laying on the ground.
"She was being stepped on," she testified. "It looked like males."
It didn't stop until a black man ran up and began pulling people off her, Loren said. She recalled him yelling at the youths to stop.
She said a young black woman grabbed her under her arms and helped her stand up, taking her closer to where her friends were standing.
The woman screamed for ice for the victim's swollen and bloody face as neighbors began to come forward, Loren recalled.
"I was bleeding really bad and grabbing at my nose," she said.
The police arrived first, followed by paramedics. Not long afterward, officers told her that they had found some people who might have been involved and wanted to drive her to a nearby parking lot to see if she could identify those people.
The victims were taken in separate vehicles one at a time, Loren said.
She sat in a police SUV with an officer who wrote down what she said as a line of youths was asked to come forward one by one into the glare of several police headlights and search lights.
She said she immediately recognized the first person, a girl in a white shirt, and told the officer, "Yeah, that's the one that beat my friend. I think she was attacking Laura."
Loren explained in court that the reason she told the officer she thought it was the girl who attacked her friend, rather than say she knew it was the girl, was because she had been instructed to be as specific as possible.
She had seen the girl going toward Laura, she said.
"She was attacking Laura, but I wasn't positive she was punching her or pushing her," Loren explained.
She also said she wasn't able to identify all the minors arrested that night.
As the district attorney began to show the victim police photos taken of the 10 youths in the parking lot, several defense attorneys objected.
Showing the victim the photos before asking her to identify the minors in court would coach her into saying precisely what the prosecutor wanted, they argued.
The same objection was raised with the first witness to testify; an 18-year-old who was in the area with her baby, her friend and her younger sister at the time of the beating. As in the first witness' case, the judge overruled the objection but it was quickly followed by several others made by most of the 10 defense attorneys in court.
Judge Lee ended Friday's proceedings at that point, saying he would return to the issue next week. Court is expected to resume Monday at 1:30 p.m.
The victim - who asked the Press-Telegram in previous interviews to be identified by only her first name, Loren, out of concern for her safety - was with two friends visiting a haunted house in Bixby Knolls when the three white women were attacked by a group of black youths.
She appeared composed and confident while on the witness stand. The only moment that revealed any nervousness came as she stood next to a diagram where she was asked to note her position and the position of her friends and the attackers at the time of the beating.
As Deputy District Attorney Andrea Bouas and several defense attorneys stopped for a brief discussion, Loren nervously capped and uncapped a red marker as she waited for the prosecutor's questions to resume.
Loren's mother said outside court that the 21-year-old victim was horribly nervous about testifying, having never done it before.
Her daughter is also struggling with her extensive injuries, she said. A team of doctors, including two surgeons, are trying to determine how best to treat her dizzy spells and her drooping eye.
Several of her teeth have died and will have to be replaced with a partial plate. No one yet knows if she will regain the sight partially lost in the one eye.
She is studying photography, and her injuries forced her to drop all her college classes this year. Her injuries could destroy her dreams of pursuing a career as a professional photographer.
Loren was perhaps the most seriously hurt the night of the attack, which resulted in the arrest of 10 Long Beach youths - 9 girls and one boy, ages 12 to 19 - within moments of the 9:30 p.m. beating.
A few days later, police arrested two 17-year-old males, both from Long Beach. They have been charged with the same counts for which the 10 minors are currently being tried, or adjudicated as it is called in juvenile court.
The charge includes three felony counts of assault by any means of force to produce great bodily injury. Eight of the 10 minors currently in court had a hate crime enhancement added to their charges, and the two 17-year-old boys - whose adjudications are set for early January - also face the hate crime allegation.
All of the minors are black, and witness statements that the youths shouted racial slurs while beating the three victims have resulted in community and nationwide outrage.
Court proceedings so far have been slow, due in part to the difficulty of transporting the 10 minors to the Long Beach courthouse from various Los Angeles County juvenile detention centers.
Each minor has his or her own attorney, to avoid a conflict of interest, making for drawn-out arguments at times.
Friday's session, scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m., started late after the prosecutor argued defense lawyers had violated Superior Court Judge Gibson Lee's order the previous day.
On Thursday, defense attorneys told reporters they changed the seating of the defendants. Until then, all the minors had sat directly behind their attorneys.
When the district attorney asked the first witness to take the stand to identify the minors in court Thursday, she matched the wrong police photograph to one of the girls in court.
Defense attorneys seized on the mistake. During cross examination the witness admitted the error, saying she could not see all of the defendants and therefore picked the wrong one. After further prompting, she said she based her identification the night of the arrest largely on what the minors were wearing, not their facial features.
Prior to the start of testimony Friday, Bouas argued that the defense attorneys had talked about moving the defendants but were told by the judge not to, according to bailiffs and officers in the closed courtroom.
The minors were rearranged anyway and Bouas accused the defense of running a "shell game," officers said.
Many of the defense attorneys became angry at the accusation, the officers said. They told the judge they did not know how the youths had been rearranged, but agreed to have the minors seated behind their assigned lawyer from now on.
"The judge stopped short of saying they violated an order," one officer said. "But he made it clear that it would not happen again."
All the officers spoke on condition of anonymity.
Once that matter was settled, the public was allowed into the courtroom and Bouas began with Loren's testimony.
Loren described how she and her friends began the night at her house, where they dressed in their costumes - she as Betty Boop, her friend Michelle as a pirate and her friend Laura as a vampire.
They had decided to go see the haunted house, located on Linden Avenue at the corner of Bixby Road, while they were waiting for a fourth friend to get off work. That was when they were all going to go to a costume party, she said.
When she and her friends arrived at the haunted house, she said, a young black male - whom she estimated to be 17 to 19 years old - was standing with a group of youths and began hollering "Are you with it?" at her and her friends while grabbing his crotch.
After the victims made their way through the haunted house and returned to the front yard where they had started, she noticed the crowd had grown larger and included girls and boys.
"He said, `Are you with it?' again," Loren testified. "He was loud, he was yelling."
The crowd was also getting louder and more boisterous and the victims could hear other things, she said.
"I heard them (say) something about the white people and `white b---."' Loren testified.
She described trying to walk away and being pelted with pumpkins and lemons. She was hit in the back of the head and in her back. The force was strong enough to cause pain, she recalled.
She also recalled seeing one of her friends - Laura - get hit in the back and in the legs. That is when her friend turned around and told the crowd to stop.
As Laura turned back toward Loren and Michelle, she said, she saw at least two girls grab that friend by her long hair and her dress and yank her backward.
"I heard one voice say, `I f------ hate white people,"' Loren testified.
It was a male voice that shouted the statement, loud enough to be heard over the shouting crowd, she said.
At about the same time she said she heard male and female voices saying, "white b---," and the group surged toward Laura, partially surrounding her friend and cutting off her access to Michelle and Loren.
Loren recalled yelling to Michelle that they were getting separated. Michelle was shouting back that she was calling 911 as she dialed her cell phone.
The victim described, and was asked to demonstrate, how her friend was knocked to the ground. Loren then recalled seeing a young man flip a skateboard he had at his side up over his head.
"I saw him flip it up and swing in the direction of Laura," she testified, describing the suspect as black, tall and with a medium build, adding that he was big but not overweight.
His hair was close to his head, in either braids or corn rows, she added.
Loren said she rushed back to Laura but was quickly surrounded by a group of about a dozen people, mostly girls. They circled her in two rows, one inside the other, she described.
She first felt someone kick the back of her leg, just below her knee, and her leg buckled. But she did not fall, the victim testified.
Punches to her face and the back of her head rained down on her, with more than one person hitting her and most of them girls, she said.
She felt her left cheek pop from the force of one extremely strong blow and assumed it was from a male.
She said she ducked her face and flailed her arms, trying to stop her attackers, but they continued beating her.
"I could feel the rhythm of one-two ... getting punched in the back of the head and the face," she recalled.
She was eventually knocked to the ground when she tried to flip open her cell phone to call for help, and it was knocked out of her hand, she said.
Many of them were girls, she said. Some were wearing sweaters with the Rocawear logo, several had braids and some wore hoop earrings, Loren testified.
Rocawear is a popular line of clothing created by rapper Jay-Z.
Curled in a ball on her knees, Loren said she wrapped her arms over her head and kept her legs tucked under her body. She could feel people pounding her with their fists and kicking her, striking her on top of her head, around her face, her back and up and down her body, she said.
"Once I hit the ground, I remember being kicked by what I thought was a man," she testified. "Because the force was so hard, and when I looked up I thought I could see ... male legs."
At one point, she peered out from under her arm and said she could see one of her friends laying on the ground.
"She was being stepped on," she testified. "It looked like males."
It didn't stop until a black man ran up and began pulling people off her, Loren said. She recalled him yelling at the youths to stop.
She said a young black woman grabbed her under her arms and helped her stand up, taking her closer to where her friends were standing.
The woman screamed for ice for the victim's swollen and bloody face as neighbors began to come forward, Loren recalled.
"I was bleeding really bad and grabbing at my nose," she said.
The police arrived first, followed by paramedics. Not long afterward, officers told her that they had found some people who might have been involved and wanted to drive her to a nearby parking lot to see if she could identify those people.
The victims were taken in separate vehicles one at a time, Loren said.
She sat in a police SUV with an officer who wrote down what she said as a line of youths was asked to come forward one by one into the glare of several police headlights and search lights.
She said she immediately recognized the first person, a girl in a white shirt, and told the officer, "Yeah, that's the one that beat my friend. I think she was attacking Laura."
Loren explained in court that the reason she told the officer she thought it was the girl who attacked her friend, rather than say she knew it was the girl, was because she had been instructed to be as specific as possible.
She had seen the girl going toward Laura, she said.
"She was attacking Laura, but I wasn't positive she was punching her or pushing her," Loren explained.
She also said she wasn't able to identify all the minors arrested that night.
As the district attorney began to show the victim police photos taken of the 10 youths in the parking lot, several defense attorneys objected.
Showing the victim the photos before asking her to identify the minors in court would coach her into saying precisely what the prosecutor wanted, they argued.
The same objection was raised with the first witness to testify; an 18-year-old who was in the area with her baby, her friend and her younger sister at the time of the beating. As in the first witness' case, the judge overruled the objection but it was quickly followed by several others made by most of the 10 defense attorneys in court.
Judge Lee ended Friday's proceedings at that point, saying he would return to the issue next week. Court is expected to resume Monday at 1:30 p.m.
Despite Rumors, Birdman Unharmed In Sister's Deadly Car Crash
Rampant rumors of Cash Money co-founder Bryan "Birdman" Williams getting into a car crash yesterday morning (December 11) have been put to rest as details about the aforementioned accident have come to light.
According to The Times Picayune, Birdman's sister, Tamara Williams, was killed in a head-on collision when her vehicle was struck by a motorist driving in the wrong direction down New Orleans' Causeway Boulevard early Monday morning. Baby was not in the car.
The other motorist, who was identified as 30 year-old Jason Williams of Memphis, was taken to the CharityTraumaCenter in Elmwood, where he remains in grave condition. He had no relation to Tamara.
Col. John Fortunato, a spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, revealed that Tamara was driving north on Causeway Boulevard in her 2006 Toyota Camry. She was in the far left lane on the up-slope of the northbound overpass when Jason rounded the top of the hill in his 2001 Chevrolet Silverado and hit her head-on.
How Jason ended up driving south down the wrong side of Causeway Boulevard is still a mystery. Because of his condition, investigators have not been able to question him.
"We have no idea how he could have gotten on that side," said Fortunato.
Tamara, 26, was a married mother of three boys and was studying for a nursing degree at Our Lady of Holy Cross College. She was the youngest of six siblings.
According to The Times Picayune, Birdman's sister, Tamara Williams, was killed in a head-on collision when her vehicle was struck by a motorist driving in the wrong direction down New Orleans' Causeway Boulevard early Monday morning. Baby was not in the car.
The other motorist, who was identified as 30 year-old Jason Williams of Memphis, was taken to the CharityTraumaCenter in Elmwood, where he remains in grave condition. He had no relation to Tamara.
Col. John Fortunato, a spokesman for the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, revealed that Tamara was driving north on Causeway Boulevard in her 2006 Toyota Camry. She was in the far left lane on the up-slope of the northbound overpass when Jason rounded the top of the hill in his 2001 Chevrolet Silverado and hit her head-on.
How Jason ended up driving south down the wrong side of Causeway Boulevard is still a mystery. Because of his condition, investigators have not been able to question him.
"We have no idea how he could have gotten on that side," said Fortunato.
Tamara, 26, was a married mother of three boys and was studying for a nursing degree at Our Lady of Holy Cross College. She was the youngest of six siblings.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
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'Water is Currently Flowing on Mars' (NASA)(NO BS)
(Breaking News) 'Water is Currently Flowing on Mars' (NASA)(NO BS)
The image on the right shows a gully in a crater formed after the photo on the left was taken in 1999
New photographs taken of Mars suggest that water occasionally flows across the surface of the planet.
The images, taken by Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor, show changes in craters that provide the strongest evidence yet that water flowed through them as recently as several years ago.
Michael Mayer, head of Nasa's Washington-based Mars Exploration Programme, said: "These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars."
The photographs show finger-shaped gullies several hundred metres long in the sides of craters.
Michael Malin, the lead researcher in the study of pictures taken by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mars Global Surveyor in 2004 and 2005, said the photos are "what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water".
Search for life
The surface of Mars is too cold for liquid water to exist, but scientists believe underground water filtered to the surface carrying debris downslope long enough to form the gullies before it froze.
"This underscores the importance of searching for life on Mars, either present or past."
Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder
During its Mars exploration missions, Nasa has pursued a "follow the water" strategy to determine if the planet once contained life or could support it now.
Scientists believe ancient Mars was awash with pools of water and researchers have spotted evidence of water ice at the planet's North Pole.
"This underscores the importance of searching for life on Mars, either present or past," Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who had no role in the study, said. "It's one more reason to think that life could be there."
Some scientists have said the gullies could have been created by liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) coming to the surface, but Nasa experts say this is unlikely.
Others say materials such as sand or dust can flow like a liquid and produce similar results.
Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in an email to the Associated Press news agency: "Nothing in the images, no matter how cool they are, proves that the flows were wet, or that they were anything more exciting than avalanches of sand and dust."
The Mars Global Surveyor orbiter has taken 240,000 pictures of the surface of Mars since 1997 but the agency lost contact with the spacecraft in November.
The image on the right shows a gully in a crater formed after the photo on the left was taken in 1999
New photographs taken of Mars suggest that water occasionally flows across the surface of the planet.
The images, taken by Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor, show changes in craters that provide the strongest evidence yet that water flowed through them as recently as several years ago.
Michael Mayer, head of Nasa's Washington-based Mars Exploration Programme, said: "These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars."
The photographs show finger-shaped gullies several hundred metres long in the sides of craters.
Michael Malin, the lead researcher in the study of pictures taken by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mars Global Surveyor in 2004 and 2005, said the photos are "what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water".
Search for life
The surface of Mars is too cold for liquid water to exist, but scientists believe underground water filtered to the surface carrying debris downslope long enough to form the gullies before it froze.
"This underscores the importance of searching for life on Mars, either present or past."
Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder
During its Mars exploration missions, Nasa has pursued a "follow the water" strategy to determine if the planet once contained life or could support it now.
Scientists believe ancient Mars was awash with pools of water and researchers have spotted evidence of water ice at the planet's North Pole.
"This underscores the importance of searching for life on Mars, either present or past," Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who had no role in the study, said. "It's one more reason to think that life could be there."
Some scientists have said the gullies could have been created by liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) coming to the surface, but Nasa experts say this is unlikely.
Others say materials such as sand or dust can flow like a liquid and produce similar results.
Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in an email to the Associated Press news agency: "Nothing in the images, no matter how cool they are, proves that the flows were wet, or that they were anything more exciting than avalanches of sand and dust."
The Mars Global Surveyor orbiter has taken 240,000 pictures of the surface of Mars since 1997 but the agency lost contact with the spacecraft in November.
Paris Hilton getting on dirty with her sister (Pics inside)
Sex-mad Paris is well-known for her lack of inhibitions.
But even she was pushing back the boundaries when she posed for this sizzling set of snaps on a visit to the Playboy Mansion in LA.
Paris, wearing stockings and suspenders and an animal-print basque, seems to be loving every minute of being captured bottom to bottom with Nicky, 23.
Their feet are clamped on the roof of their limo as they soak up the limelight.
In another shot Paris, 25, hugs and kisses her wide-eyed little sis - who is dressed in only a silky slip.
Our snapper said: “I know sisters can be a touchy feely but this was taking it to an extreme.
Man Trapped For 4 Days Behind A 7ft Mountain of His Own Sh1t and Jars of Piss
December 10, 2006 -- Police and firefighters yesterday rescued a Long Island man who had been trapped in his bedroom for four days after piling up a 7-foot-high mountain made up of bags of his own feces, jars of urine and other debris.
An officer responded to Charles Ruoff's dilapidated home in Centerport around 3:30 a.m. after receiving an anonymous 911 call asking police to check up on the 64-year-old veteran who hadn't been seen in days.
As he explored the house, the cop heard Ruoff calling weakly from a second-floor bedroom where he had walled himself in with a mountain of his own filth. He said he had been trapped since Tuesday.
The Centerport Fire Department freed Ruoff using heavy rescue equipment.
Ruoff was taken to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Northport where he was treated for dehydration, hypothermia, bedsores and general weakness, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Donner said.
An officer responded to Charles Ruoff's dilapidated home in Centerport around 3:30 a.m. after receiving an anonymous 911 call asking police to check up on the 64-year-old veteran who hadn't been seen in days.
As he explored the house, the cop heard Ruoff calling weakly from a second-floor bedroom where he had walled himself in with a mountain of his own filth. He said he had been trapped since Tuesday.
The Centerport Fire Department freed Ruoff using heavy rescue equipment.
Ruoff was taken to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Northport where he was treated for dehydration, hypothermia, bedsores and general weakness, Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Donner said.
The Human Botfly
Imagine a creature, so vile, that it would give the fauna and flora of a Shakesperean nunnery great pause. Such imagery almost describes the evil and nasty horror of our first animal, the human botfly.
The harrowing story that follows explains the rotten evil of a human botfly and why you should buy guide books when traveling. From a certain brave man, and friends, who fell victim in Costa Rica;
"Upon returning home from Costa Rica Mark started to experience a strange pain in his scrotum. He finally mentioned it to me (his wife); we talked about what it could be. Spider bite? Infected mosquito bite?"
It's important to note here that if you have strange pains in your scrotum, it's usually a good idea to give the good ol' doctor a call. Someway or another, it's bound to be trouble.
"I remember reading something in the guide book from our 1st (honeymoon) trip about a weird bug in Costa Rica. The guide book Explore Costa Rica by Harry S. Pariser said.... "'Botfly (Dermatobia hominis), whose larvae mature inside flesh. An egg-laden female botfly captures a night-flying female mosquito and glues her eggs on to it. When the mosquito is released and bites a victim, the host's body heat triggers an egg to hatch. It falls off and burrows in. The larva secures itself with two anal hooks, secreting an antibiotic into its burrow, which staves off competing bacteria and fungi. Its spiracle pokes out of the tiny hole, and a small mound forms which will grow to the size of a goose egg before the mature larva falls out.'"
In case there are any problems with visualizing such a creature, below is a picture of the cute larval botfly (live) that was inside Mark from the story.
The Tarantula Hawk Wasp
During a lecture in undergrad, I had a professor who one day walked in with a mischievous smile on his face and container in hand. Casually, he walked to the head of the room and inverted the container on a desk. Soon a few gasps came from the front row along with uneasy shuffles from a few others. A pretty nice sized tarantula was now on display in the classroom.
Our professor walked around with the tarantula, which he was called in to remove from another faculty member's house earlier in the day, and it was quite visually apparent that the poor arachnid was going balder than Costanza, specifically in the butt-end region. The reason for this is that tarantula's have nemeses, namely the the tarantula hawk moth in southern California.
Looking like a creature of fiction, the hawk moth is an animal that likes to use others to raise it's young. Unlike the bot fly, the hawk moth is more direct in it's approach in finding a surrogate nanny.
The hawk moth, specifically the female, is constantly on the look for tarantulas. When ready to lay eggs, female hawk moths will go to great lengths, including teasing burrows, in order to coax a tarantula to come out into the open. When a tarantula does make such a mistake, the wasp stings the spider and injects it with venom.
During an initial attack a tarantula may try to flick it's barbed abdominal hairs toward the wasp, in defense, but quite often will fall victim to the sting. Once injected with venom, the tarantula becomes paralyzed and the wasp gleefully drags it back to it's burrow where it will lay a single egg and close the paralyzed spider in the chamber. Once developed, a grub emerges from the egg and flips backward to "juice" the spider. After the grub's final molt, it usually rips open the spider's abdomen and ravenously eats what is left inside.
If it turns out reincarnation is the key to life, and you come back as a tarantula, make sure not to fall victim to the gold-digging ploys of a hawk moth.
Box Jellyfish
Memories of a jellyfish sting usually bring thoughts of a little pain, but that usually gets clouded by memories of good beach fun. There are some jellyfish, however, that will leave you dead if you happen to bump into them and aren't prepared. Such is the box jellyfish.
One of the most dangerous sea creatures, the box jellyfish accounts for more deaths than sharks or any other marine animal. This cube-like animal has a body of around only 20 cm, but it's danger lies in the nematocysts found on it's tentacles. Like a sea-ward reggae star it's tentacles, found on each of it's corners, can grow to about 3 meters (about ten feet) in length, or about the size of a regulation NBA basketball goal.
Each of the tentacles can contain up to 5,000 of the "stinging cells", commonly called nematocytes. It's toxin can be very fatal to humans and is why it can easily cause death. As luck would have it, the stinging parts of the jellyfish are activated by chemical compounds that are found in human skin. In no less than three minutes after contact, a box jellyfish can kill you.
Bombadier Beetles
It would be fun if we could grow superweapons on our bodies. Imagine the fun of pranking friends by popping them with superheated gas that you could shoot at will. For the bombadier beetle, this is reality.
When threatened by an enemy, the beetle is able to mix a chemical cocktail in a thick-walled gland. This process yields a temperature of 212 degrees (100 C) from the mixed chemicals. When ready, the beetle triggers the release of an anti-inhibitor to it's chemical cocktail which causes an explosion and a nice popping noise. The stream of chemicals and spray released is enough to blind or wound a would be predator, and can cause great pains in a human.
Like a true bomber, the beetle can produce around 20 of these explosions per minute and aim with pinpoint accuracy. If an animal tries to flank it, or run away from it's abdomen, it's not a problem and the animal will still be screwed. The beetles have specialized sheaths that can aim it's explosive cocktail forward or any other direction. If genetic engineering ever allows it, I want a dogcat with this ability.
Porcupines
While the porcupine is very common and known, and surely isn't as cool as the hedgehog, it's existence brings one common question question to the fore; "How do porcupines mate?"
With all the quills sticking about one would think the ritual would be short and tedious. It turns out that porcupines have some questionable morals and are into some strange stuff.
The ritual kicks off with the male, using it's poor sense of smell and eyesight, tracking down a female porcupine who leaves scent cues and a cat-like noise to let males know she is ready to mate. A male may walk about at times growling, hopping on three legs and in Al Bundy fashion, resting a free paw on it's genitalia and fighting other males it may come across to determine the most superior male of the suitors. The brawls between the males can be quite brutal, with some porcupines being hit with more than 1500 quills.
When a female is nearby and may be receptive to advances, a male porcupine will raise it's tail and begin to walk on it's hind legs. This point is when the male's penis becomes fully erect. This is also where things take a turn, as described by porcupine expert Uldis Roze in The North American Porcupine;
"Perhaps the strangest aspect of the interaction is male urine-hosing of the female. The male approaches on his hind legs and tail, grunting in a low tone. His penis springs erect. He then becomes a urine cannon, squirting high-pressure jets of urine at the female. Everything suggests the urine is fired by ejaculation, not released by normal bladder pressure.... In less than a minute, a female may be thoroughly wetted from nose to tail."
If the female likes the male, she will raise her tail and underside and continue to mate with the male through a half-day until the male reaches the point of complete exhaustion. If the female doesn't like the male, she'll either run away or give a prickly surprise to the poor guy.
The harrowing story that follows explains the rotten evil of a human botfly and why you should buy guide books when traveling. From a certain brave man, and friends, who fell victim in Costa Rica;
"Upon returning home from Costa Rica Mark started to experience a strange pain in his scrotum. He finally mentioned it to me (his wife); we talked about what it could be. Spider bite? Infected mosquito bite?"
It's important to note here that if you have strange pains in your scrotum, it's usually a good idea to give the good ol' doctor a call. Someway or another, it's bound to be trouble.
"I remember reading something in the guide book from our 1st (honeymoon) trip about a weird bug in Costa Rica. The guide book Explore Costa Rica by Harry S. Pariser said.... "'Botfly (Dermatobia hominis), whose larvae mature inside flesh. An egg-laden female botfly captures a night-flying female mosquito and glues her eggs on to it. When the mosquito is released and bites a victim, the host's body heat triggers an egg to hatch. It falls off and burrows in. The larva secures itself with two anal hooks, secreting an antibiotic into its burrow, which staves off competing bacteria and fungi. Its spiracle pokes out of the tiny hole, and a small mound forms which will grow to the size of a goose egg before the mature larva falls out.'"
In case there are any problems with visualizing such a creature, below is a picture of the cute larval botfly (live) that was inside Mark from the story.
The Tarantula Hawk Wasp
During a lecture in undergrad, I had a professor who one day walked in with a mischievous smile on his face and container in hand. Casually, he walked to the head of the room and inverted the container on a desk. Soon a few gasps came from the front row along with uneasy shuffles from a few others. A pretty nice sized tarantula was now on display in the classroom.
Our professor walked around with the tarantula, which he was called in to remove from another faculty member's house earlier in the day, and it was quite visually apparent that the poor arachnid was going balder than Costanza, specifically in the butt-end region. The reason for this is that tarantula's have nemeses, namely the the tarantula hawk moth in southern California.
Looking like a creature of fiction, the hawk moth is an animal that likes to use others to raise it's young. Unlike the bot fly, the hawk moth is more direct in it's approach in finding a surrogate nanny.
The hawk moth, specifically the female, is constantly on the look for tarantulas. When ready to lay eggs, female hawk moths will go to great lengths, including teasing burrows, in order to coax a tarantula to come out into the open. When a tarantula does make such a mistake, the wasp stings the spider and injects it with venom.
During an initial attack a tarantula may try to flick it's barbed abdominal hairs toward the wasp, in defense, but quite often will fall victim to the sting. Once injected with venom, the tarantula becomes paralyzed and the wasp gleefully drags it back to it's burrow where it will lay a single egg and close the paralyzed spider in the chamber. Once developed, a grub emerges from the egg and flips backward to "juice" the spider. After the grub's final molt, it usually rips open the spider's abdomen and ravenously eats what is left inside.
If it turns out reincarnation is the key to life, and you come back as a tarantula, make sure not to fall victim to the gold-digging ploys of a hawk moth.
Box Jellyfish
Memories of a jellyfish sting usually bring thoughts of a little pain, but that usually gets clouded by memories of good beach fun. There are some jellyfish, however, that will leave you dead if you happen to bump into them and aren't prepared. Such is the box jellyfish.
One of the most dangerous sea creatures, the box jellyfish accounts for more deaths than sharks or any other marine animal. This cube-like animal has a body of around only 20 cm, but it's danger lies in the nematocysts found on it's tentacles. Like a sea-ward reggae star it's tentacles, found on each of it's corners, can grow to about 3 meters (about ten feet) in length, or about the size of a regulation NBA basketball goal.
Each of the tentacles can contain up to 5,000 of the "stinging cells", commonly called nematocytes. It's toxin can be very fatal to humans and is why it can easily cause death. As luck would have it, the stinging parts of the jellyfish are activated by chemical compounds that are found in human skin. In no less than three minutes after contact, a box jellyfish can kill you.
Bombadier Beetles
It would be fun if we could grow superweapons on our bodies. Imagine the fun of pranking friends by popping them with superheated gas that you could shoot at will. For the bombadier beetle, this is reality.
When threatened by an enemy, the beetle is able to mix a chemical cocktail in a thick-walled gland. This process yields a temperature of 212 degrees (100 C) from the mixed chemicals. When ready, the beetle triggers the release of an anti-inhibitor to it's chemical cocktail which causes an explosion and a nice popping noise. The stream of chemicals and spray released is enough to blind or wound a would be predator, and can cause great pains in a human.
Like a true bomber, the beetle can produce around 20 of these explosions per minute and aim with pinpoint accuracy. If an animal tries to flank it, or run away from it's abdomen, it's not a problem and the animal will still be screwed. The beetles have specialized sheaths that can aim it's explosive cocktail forward or any other direction. If genetic engineering ever allows it, I want a dogcat with this ability.
Porcupines
While the porcupine is very common and known, and surely isn't as cool as the hedgehog, it's existence brings one common question question to the fore; "How do porcupines mate?"
With all the quills sticking about one would think the ritual would be short and tedious. It turns out that porcupines have some questionable morals and are into some strange stuff.
The ritual kicks off with the male, using it's poor sense of smell and eyesight, tracking down a female porcupine who leaves scent cues and a cat-like noise to let males know she is ready to mate. A male may walk about at times growling, hopping on three legs and in Al Bundy fashion, resting a free paw on it's genitalia and fighting other males it may come across to determine the most superior male of the suitors. The brawls between the males can be quite brutal, with some porcupines being hit with more than 1500 quills.
When a female is nearby and may be receptive to advances, a male porcupine will raise it's tail and begin to walk on it's hind legs. This point is when the male's penis becomes fully erect. This is also where things take a turn, as described by porcupine expert Uldis Roze in The North American Porcupine;
"Perhaps the strangest aspect of the interaction is male urine-hosing of the female. The male approaches on his hind legs and tail, grunting in a low tone. His penis springs erect. He then becomes a urine cannon, squirting high-pressure jets of urine at the female. Everything suggests the urine is fired by ejaculation, not released by normal bladder pressure.... In less than a minute, a female may be thoroughly wetted from nose to tail."
If the female likes the male, she will raise her tail and underside and continue to mate with the male through a half-day until the male reaches the point of complete exhaustion. If the female doesn't like the male, she'll either run away or give a prickly surprise to the poor guy.
The skinny on Nicole: Bagged in wrong-way drive rap
Nicole Richie was arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs after police bagged the teeny-weeny reality TV star going the wrong way on a California freeway.
The California Highway Patrol arrested the 25-year-old party girl and co-star of “The Simple Life” after she failed a field sobriety test, and admitted to officers that she had taken the prescription painkiller Vicodin and smoked marijuana.
Singer Lionel Richie’s daughter was tested for drugs and released on her own recognizance, reported CHiP’s spokesman Todd Workman. The results of the test haven’t been determined, he said.
Richie’s arrest came about six weeks after it was revealed that she had checked herself into a treatment facility to address weight-loss issues. A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department report revealed that the 5-foot-1 actress weighed 85 pounds at the time of her booking.
Workman said police encountered Richie with her car at a standstill blocking the carpool lane on the Ventura Freeway in Burbank at about 1:45 a.m. He said the officers were responding to reports from other motorists of a driver going the wrong way on the busy highway.
Although Richie’s 2005 black Mercedes SUV was pointed in the right direction when police found her, the vehicle matched the description of an SUV seen entering the freeway against traffic nearby, Workman said.
According to Workman, Richie was alone in her vehicle and on her cell phone when police approached her. He described her as “very cooperative” and said she told police she had been following a friend on the freeway when she got lost.
Richie, who has previously undergone treatment for heroin addiction, was subsequently booked into jail on a DUI charge. She’s due in court Feb. 7.
Her reps had no comment on the arrest yesterday.
The California Highway Patrol arrested the 25-year-old party girl and co-star of “The Simple Life” after she failed a field sobriety test, and admitted to officers that she had taken the prescription painkiller Vicodin and smoked marijuana.
Singer Lionel Richie’s daughter was tested for drugs and released on her own recognizance, reported CHiP’s spokesman Todd Workman. The results of the test haven’t been determined, he said.
Richie’s arrest came about six weeks after it was revealed that she had checked herself into a treatment facility to address weight-loss issues. A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department report revealed that the 5-foot-1 actress weighed 85 pounds at the time of her booking.
Workman said police encountered Richie with her car at a standstill blocking the carpool lane on the Ventura Freeway in Burbank at about 1:45 a.m. He said the officers were responding to reports from other motorists of a driver going the wrong way on the busy highway.
Although Richie’s 2005 black Mercedes SUV was pointed in the right direction when police found her, the vehicle matched the description of an SUV seen entering the freeway against traffic nearby, Workman said.
According to Workman, Richie was alone in her vehicle and on her cell phone when police approached her. He described her as “very cooperative” and said she told police she had been following a friend on the freeway when she got lost.
Richie, who has previously undergone treatment for heroin addiction, was subsequently booked into jail on a DUI charge. She’s due in court Feb. 7.
Her reps had no comment on the arrest yesterday.
Monday, December 11, 2006
No Wedding for Beyoncé, Jay-Z
Don't believe the rumors that Beyoncé and Jay-Z are getting married at a luxury Caribbean resort this weekend.
A rep for Beyoncé is denying the reports, and a spokeswoman for Jay-Z told Reuters she had no knowledge of any approaching nuptials.
Beyoncé, 25, recently said that she and pals were planning a birthday party for Jay-Z, who turned 37 on Monday – not a wedding, Reuters reports.
But on Wednesday, the New York Post reported that the planned four-day bash was a smokescreen for a secret Caribbean wedding that was to include a ceremony at the Cap Juluca resort on Anguilla and a party aboard a yacht anchored off St. Barts.
Whatever their weekend plans, on Monday Beyoncé is due to appear on the red carpet for the Beverly Hills premiere of her new movie Dreamgirls.
Though the couple of nearly four years don't speak publicly about their relationship, Beyoncé recently told Elle that her song lyrics about cheating boyfriends don't reflect her own experience: "I'm sure people will read into that," she said, "but there's nothing to read into. Sorry to disappoint you!"
A rep for Beyoncé is denying the reports, and a spokeswoman for Jay-Z told Reuters she had no knowledge of any approaching nuptials.
Beyoncé, 25, recently said that she and pals were planning a birthday party for Jay-Z, who turned 37 on Monday – not a wedding, Reuters reports.
But on Wednesday, the New York Post reported that the planned four-day bash was a smokescreen for a secret Caribbean wedding that was to include a ceremony at the Cap Juluca resort on Anguilla and a party aboard a yacht anchored off St. Barts.
Whatever their weekend plans, on Monday Beyoncé is due to appear on the red carpet for the Beverly Hills premiere of her new movie Dreamgirls.
Though the couple of nearly four years don't speak publicly about their relationship, Beyoncé recently told Elle that her song lyrics about cheating boyfriends don't reflect her own experience: "I'm sure people will read into that," she said, "but there's nothing to read into. Sorry to disappoint you!"
Bow wow used N word on stage
Bow Wow isn’t deleting the N-word from his lyrics.
At last night’s Jingle Ball Concert hosted by 102.7 KIIS FM, Bow Wow gave a no-holds-barred performance in front of thousands of screaming youngsters.
A shirtless and dancing Bow announced, lyrically, that he is single and not dating Ciara, while dropping the N-word throughout his songs. In the aftermath of the Michael Richards rant, some artists have chosen to lose the derogatory term, but not Bow Wow.
No one at the concert seemed to be affected by his use of the word; perhaps his younger audience is unaware of the weight the word has carried.
Calls to Bow Wow’s reps were not immediately returned.
At last night’s Jingle Ball Concert hosted by 102.7 KIIS FM, Bow Wow gave a no-holds-barred performance in front of thousands of screaming youngsters.
A shirtless and dancing Bow announced, lyrically, that he is single and not dating Ciara, while dropping the N-word throughout his songs. In the aftermath of the Michael Richards rant, some artists have chosen to lose the derogatory term, but not Bow Wow.
No one at the concert seemed to be affected by his use of the word; perhaps his younger audience is unaware of the weight the word has carried.
Calls to Bow Wow’s reps were not immediately returned.
U.S. dollar facing imminent collapse?
Even as the stock market is hitting new record highs almost every day, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are quietly coordinating a devaluation of the dollar that the Bush administration hopes will be a slow decline rather than a dollar collapse.
This week, in an unusual move, the Bush administration is sending virtually the entire economic "A-team" to visit China for a "strategic economic dialogue" in Beijing Dec. 14 and 15.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are leading the delegation, along with five other cabinet-level officials, including Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. Also in the delegation will be Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab.
The Bush administration wants to get China's cooperation in preventing a dollar collapse. That's the conclusion of John Williams, an experienced professional econometrician, who writes the "Shadow Government Statistics" blog.
Williams has re-created M3, a money-supply measure whose data the Federal Reserve simply stopped publishing after issuing a technically worded March 2006 announcement.
Williams reports M3 is currently growing at close to a 9.6 percent rate and trending higher, compared with an 8 percent rate early this year, when the Fed quit reporting the measure.
"The Fed is pumping liquidity into the U.S. economy," Williams told WND, "and the Fed evidently did not want the markets to follow too closely what the Fed was doing with the money supply."
China today now is holding a historically unprecedented $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. During the Thanksgiving holiday, an announcement by China that their central bank planned to diversify foreign-exchange holding away from the dollar caused the dollar to drop in value on international currency markets. Since then, the dollar has hit a 20-month low against the euro.
"This was almost an orchestrated announcement," Williams claimed. "Around Thanksgiving the markets were thinly traded. I'm not sure who was playing games there, but the signal was clearly heard."
"You're dealing with mass psychology here," Williams argued. "The central bankers around the world know they are going to take a hit on their dollar holdings. None of the central bankers want to start a dollar panic, but none of the central bankers want to be the last out of the dollar, either."
Williams explained that the Federal Reserve is in a bind.
"Raising rates would kill any chance of avoiding a recession, but in terms of the dollar, we can't raise the rates fast enough when the dollar starts to slip quickly."
Are we experiencing a dollar collapse?
"Not yet," Williams answered. "I believe we're going to have a dollar collapse, but the Fed is going to do its best to slow play the dollar's decline in value, so that it takes a year or two for the dollar value to reach its low point."
Williams explained the risk of collapse the dollar faces:
"There will be a central bank, most probably in Asia, who will start the move away from the dollar and when it happens, you're going to see other central bankers covertly trying to follow. The move will magnify very quickly and it could become a full-fledged panic and a dollar collapse."
The Fed is struggling right now to contain inflation and stimulate economic growth. All the Fed is doing right now with all their grand policy shifts is using a lot of propaganda and market massaging to try to prevent a financial panic."
Recent reports have shown that U.S. gross domestic product growth slowed to 1.6% in the third quarter, the lowest in more than 3 years.
Will a declining dollar help narrow the U.S. trade deficit with China?
"You could take a 30 percent decline in the value of the dollar," Williams argued, "and it wouldn't make much of a dent in our trade deficit with China, not as long as Bush administration trade policy continues to one-sided in favor China."
"The Fed is faced with an impossible circumstance with the trade and budget deficits being run by the Bush administration," Williams told WND, "and they are just playing games with the markets and the public by not publishing M3, the broadest measure of money supply and the best indicator we have of long-term activity."
M3 is the broadest measure of the total money in the economy, including checking and savings accounts, cash, time deposits, and money-market funds. Economist Milton Friedman, one of the key economists contributing to the conservative theories that led to the development of "Reaganomics," argued that money supply is a key measure correlated both with economic growth and inflation.
This week, in an unusual move, the Bush administration is sending virtually the entire economic "A-team" to visit China for a "strategic economic dialogue" in Beijing Dec. 14 and 15.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are leading the delegation, along with five other cabinet-level officials, including Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. Also in the delegation will be Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab.
The Bush administration wants to get China's cooperation in preventing a dollar collapse. That's the conclusion of John Williams, an experienced professional econometrician, who writes the "Shadow Government Statistics" blog.
Williams has re-created M3, a money-supply measure whose data the Federal Reserve simply stopped publishing after issuing a technically worded March 2006 announcement.
Williams reports M3 is currently growing at close to a 9.6 percent rate and trending higher, compared with an 8 percent rate early this year, when the Fed quit reporting the measure.
"The Fed is pumping liquidity into the U.S. economy," Williams told WND, "and the Fed evidently did not want the markets to follow too closely what the Fed was doing with the money supply."
China today now is holding a historically unprecedented $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. During the Thanksgiving holiday, an announcement by China that their central bank planned to diversify foreign-exchange holding away from the dollar caused the dollar to drop in value on international currency markets. Since then, the dollar has hit a 20-month low against the euro.
"This was almost an orchestrated announcement," Williams claimed. "Around Thanksgiving the markets were thinly traded. I'm not sure who was playing games there, but the signal was clearly heard."
"You're dealing with mass psychology here," Williams argued. "The central bankers around the world know they are going to take a hit on their dollar holdings. None of the central bankers want to start a dollar panic, but none of the central bankers want to be the last out of the dollar, either."
Williams explained that the Federal Reserve is in a bind.
"Raising rates would kill any chance of avoiding a recession, but in terms of the dollar, we can't raise the rates fast enough when the dollar starts to slip quickly."
Are we experiencing a dollar collapse?
"Not yet," Williams answered. "I believe we're going to have a dollar collapse, but the Fed is going to do its best to slow play the dollar's decline in value, so that it takes a year or two for the dollar value to reach its low point."
Williams explained the risk of collapse the dollar faces:
"There will be a central bank, most probably in Asia, who will start the move away from the dollar and when it happens, you're going to see other central bankers covertly trying to follow. The move will magnify very quickly and it could become a full-fledged panic and a dollar collapse."
The Fed is struggling right now to contain inflation and stimulate economic growth. All the Fed is doing right now with all their grand policy shifts is using a lot of propaganda and market massaging to try to prevent a financial panic."
Recent reports have shown that U.S. gross domestic product growth slowed to 1.6% in the third quarter, the lowest in more than 3 years.
Will a declining dollar help narrow the U.S. trade deficit with China?
"You could take a 30 percent decline in the value of the dollar," Williams argued, "and it wouldn't make much of a dent in our trade deficit with China, not as long as Bush administration trade policy continues to one-sided in favor China."
"The Fed is faced with an impossible circumstance with the trade and budget deficits being run by the Bush administration," Williams told WND, "and they are just playing games with the markets and the public by not publishing M3, the broadest measure of money supply and the best indicator we have of long-term activity."
M3 is the broadest measure of the total money in the economy, including checking and savings accounts, cash, time deposits, and money-market funds. Economist Milton Friedman, one of the key economists contributing to the conservative theories that led to the development of "Reaganomics," argued that money supply is a key measure correlated both with economic growth and inflation.
Hackers Release Permanent Spoof Vista Activation Server
Hackers have found a way around Microsoft Vista's activation system. Unlike Windows XP and Volume Activation 1.0 Wndows Vista doesn't have any corporate keys which will permanently activate it.
Volume Activation 2.0 requires a corporate user to either do a onetime activation through Microsoft servers (MAK) or companies can host a local activation server which does not talk to Microsoft (KMS). The only difference is KMS requires re-activation once every 180 days. However as long as there’s a local KMS server it’s simple to keep Windows Vista activated.
The hacker's release is a VMware image of a permanently activated KMS (Key Management Service) server which allows local activation of Windows Vista Business/Enterprise Edition. As such, it's not true that the workaround will be usable for only six months. Press reports stating so are written by people who don't know what they're talking about. The "client" Vista activates every six months, not the server, which in this case is permanently activated.
Volume Activation 2.0 is only built into those two editions. Companies which buy 25 numbers or more of the OS would be given the KMS to simplify the activation process. For it to work, users have to type in the non-virtual Vista two commands which launch the same Visual Basic script with different options:
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -skms vm_vista_ip
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato
The hack was released under the name of Bill Gates' wife, Melinda Gates. The actual name of the pirate scene release is "Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activatio n.Server-MelindaGates." Cracked copies of Windows Vista started flooding the internet soon after the operating system was released to manufacturing and ahead of its official release. However, the lack of a corporate activation key made most of them useless. Some activation cracks were apparently released, using some beta files from RC versions of Vista, but apparently they didn't work for everyone.
This only shows that while Microsoft tries to block illegal users from using its operating systems, they will not be able to prevail for long. For every security system there's always a workaround if you have physical access to the machine, that's a rule every security expert knows. Everything can be cracked eventually, if it's worth it.
Volume Activation 2.0 requires a corporate user to either do a onetime activation through Microsoft servers (MAK) or companies can host a local activation server which does not talk to Microsoft (KMS). The only difference is KMS requires re-activation once every 180 days. However as long as there’s a local KMS server it’s simple to keep Windows Vista activated.
The hacker's release is a VMware image of a permanently activated KMS (Key Management Service) server which allows local activation of Windows Vista Business/Enterprise Edition. As such, it's not true that the workaround will be usable for only six months. Press reports stating so are written by people who don't know what they're talking about. The "client" Vista activates every six months, not the server, which in this case is permanently activated.
Volume Activation 2.0 is only built into those two editions. Companies which buy 25 numbers or more of the OS would be given the KMS to simplify the activation process. For it to work, users have to type in the non-virtual Vista two commands which launch the same Visual Basic script with different options:
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -skms vm_vista_ip
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato
The hack was released under the name of Bill Gates' wife, Melinda Gates. The actual name of the pirate scene release is "Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activatio n.Server-MelindaGates." Cracked copies of Windows Vista started flooding the internet soon after the operating system was released to manufacturing and ahead of its official release. However, the lack of a corporate activation key made most of them useless. Some activation cracks were apparently released, using some beta files from RC versions of Vista, but apparently they didn't work for everyone.
This only shows that while Microsoft tries to block illegal users from using its operating systems, they will not be able to prevail for long. For every security system there's always a workaround if you have physical access to the machine, that's a rule every security expert knows. Everything can be cracked eventually, if it's worth it.
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