bob

More like ship happy - Hayes Haugen

"The practice of human sacrifice is on the rise in Uganda, as measured by ritual killings where body parts, often facial features or genitals, are cut off for use in ceremonies. The number of people killed in ritual murders last year rose to a new high of at least 15 children and 14 adults, up from just three cases in 2007, according to police. The informal count is much higher — 154 suspects were arrested last year and 50 taken to court over ritual killings. Children in particular are common victims, according to a U.S. State Department report released this month. The U.S. spent $500,000 to train 2,000 Ugandan police last year to investigate offences related to human trafficking, including ritual killings. The problem is bad enough that last year the police established an Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce. Posters on police station walls show a sinister stranger luring two young girls into a car below bold letters that call on parents to "Prevent Child Sacrifice."...However, the rise in human sacrifices in Uganda appears to come from a desire for wealth and a belief that drugs made from human organs can bring riches, according to task force head Moses Binoga. They may be fueled by a spate of violent Nigerian films that are growing in popularity, and showcase a common story line: A family reaping riches after sacrificing a human." - bob

Caroline Aya was playing in front of her house in January when a neighbor put a cloth over her mouth and fled with her. A couple of days later, the 8-year-old's body was found a short walk away — with her tongue cut out. Police believe she was offered up as a human sacrifice in a ritual killing, thought to bring wealth or health. - bob

Delightful. - Paul Buchheit

Isn't it in the Bible? - Gabe

looks like a fun night out (notice the cars) - bob

"Wednesday night, all 7s came up in Pennsylvania Lottery's Big 4 drawing, resulting in a whopping $7.77 million payout to 3,107 winning tickets....The Big 4 payout was a staggering 1,573 percent of sales, according to lottery spokeswoman Kirstin Alvanitakis. In other words: The lottery has to dish out about $7.2 million more than it took in for that drawing....Also, 7-7-7-7 is extraordinarily popular. Most Big 4 drawings produce far fewer winners. Wednesday's midday drawing had 104 winners, and Tuesday evening's game was hit by 250 people, Alvanitakis said." - bob

"Her offence was to unwittingly sell a goldfish to a 14-year-old boy taking part in a trading standards 'sting'. At most, pet shop owner Joan Higgins, 66, expected a slap on the wrist for breaking new animal welfare laws which ban the sale of pets to under-16s. Instead, the great-grandmother was taken to court, fined £1,000, placed under curfew - and ordered to wear an electronic tag for two months. ... The prosecution of Mrs Higgins and her son Mark is estimated to have cost taxpayers £20,000 and has left her with a criminal record. Mark, 47, was also fined and ordered to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work in the community....They sent the 14-year-old schoolboy into the shop to carry out a test purchase and Mr Higgins sold him the goldfish without questioning his age or providing any information about the care of the fish. " - bob

OH WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE FISH - Will Higgins™

" Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. The beams have been pushed to 3.5 trillion electron volts, the highest energy achieved by any physics accelerator—some three times greater than the previous record. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, plans to start trying Tuesday morning to use the powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles. " - bob

the way around the edge, and awe, and we can talk about mystery and awe, thats what we have in common - bob

Feynman. - Paul Buchheit

"Zinc is highly toxic in parrots and poisoning can often be fatal.[180] The consumption of fruit juices stored in galvanized cans has resulted in mass parrot poisonings with zinc." - bob

"So actually most of the 2000% inflation occurred since 1940. The average annual inflation rate since 1940 has been 4.11% with the 1940's, the 1970's and the 1980's having 5.63%, 7.09% and 5.55% average annual inflation respectively." - bob

"A man has been arrested for allegedly announcing a hateful message over a South Jersey Wal-Mart's intercom, police told NBC Philadelphia....Several shoppers have been boycotting the retailer since last Sunday when a man accessed the Washington Township, N.J. store's public address system and announced: "Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now."...Washington Township Police and the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office have been investigating the case as a possible hate crime. Authorities have previously said the person responsible could be charged with harassment and bias intimidation." - bob

"Watch: Wal-Mart Paging Victims Speak Out" - whole thing seems rather over done to me - bob

Some people will take any opportunity to make themselves a victim. - Gabe

"More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments. Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots...The dealership used a system called Webtech Plus as an alternative to repossessing vehicles that haven’t been paid for. Operated by Cleveland-based Pay Technologies, the system lets car dealers install a small black box under vehicle dashboards that responds to commands issued through a central website, and relayed over a wireless pager network. The dealer can disable a car’s ignition system, or trigger the horn to begin honking, as a reminder that a payment is due. The system will not stop a running vehicle." - bob

This almost seems like an Onion news story. :) - Space Cowboy

click for animated gif, pretty cool - bob

"At least 13 people were killed Saturday, some of them beheaded, around the popular beach resort of Acapulco, just as foreign visitors have begun arriving for spring break. Elsewhere in the Guerrero state where Acapulco is located, 11 other people, including soldiers and suspected traffickers, were killed, authorities said. The dead in Acapulco included five police officers, authorities said, who were ambushed while on patrol on the city's outskirts about 2 a.m...In June, as Acapulco was putting its hopes on a recovering tourist industry, 18 gunmen and soldiers were killed in battles one weekend in one of the city's seaside neighborhoods...More than 18,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon deployed the army to battle cartels in December 2006." - bob

"In a separate case this year, a British couple who shared a hotel room managed to escape trial in Dubai for having sex out of wedlock by producing a marriage certificate." - it doesnt seem like a very friendly place, i wonder why people still go - bob

It's friendly as long as you aren't. - Kevin Fox

for some reason, reminds me of http://www.snpp.com/guides... - Ivan Zuzak

"We've recently seen the largest explosion ever recorded: a supergiant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production. The resulting blast was visible for months because it unleashed a cloud of radioactive material over fifty times the size of our own star, giving off a nuclear fission glow visible from galaxies away. The super-supernova SN2007bi is an example of a "pair-instability" breakdown, and that's like calling an atomic bomb a "plutonium-pressing" device. At sizes of around four megayottagrams (that's thirty-two zeros) giant stars are supported against gravitational collapse by gamma ray pressure. The hotter the core, the higher the energy of these gamma rays - but if they get too energetic, these gamma rays can begin pair production: creating an electron-positron matter-antimatter pair out of pure energy as they pass an atom. Yes, this does mean that the entire stellar core acts as a gigantic particle accelerator. The antimatter annihilates with its opposite, as antimatter is wont to do, but the problem is that the speed of antimatter explosion - which is pretty damn fast - is still a critical delay in the gamma-pressure holding up the star. The outer layers sag in, compressing the core more, raising the temperature, making more energetic gamma rays even more likely to make antimatter and suddenly the whole star is a runaway nuclear reactor beyond the scale of the imagination. The entire thermonuclear core detonates at once, an atomic warhead that's not just bigger than the Sun - it's bigger than the Sun plus the mass of another ten close by stars. The entire star explodes. No neutron star, no black hole, nothing left behind but an expanding cloud of newly radioactive material" - bob

"In the run up to 2000, Russian supply of palladium to the global market was repeatedly delayed and disrupted[7] because the export quota was not granted on time, for political reasons. The ensuing market panic drove the palladium price to an all-time high of $1100 per troy ounce in January 2001.[8] Around this time, the Ford Motor Company, fearing auto vehicle production disruption due to a possible palladium shortage, stockpiled large amounts of the metal purchased near the price high. When prices fell in early 2001, Ford lost nearly US$1 billion." - bob

It's outstanding. - Brook White

"With permission from the patients, investigators followed the trail of grocery purchases to a Rhode Island company that makes salami, then zeroed in on the pepper used to season the meat... At least 245 people in 44 states have been sickened in the outbreak. That includes 30 in California, 19 in Illinois, 18 in New York and 17 in Washington state...Through interviews and questionnaires, investigators suspected some kind of Italian meat was the culprit, but people couldn't remember what brand they bought, Behravesh said. So the CDC asked supermarkets for certain buying information on seven victims in Washington state, focusing on suspect products rather than everything the customers had bought, Behravesh said. "We didn't care about the brand of toilet paper people were buying," she said. Of those seven people, five had bought Italian meats made by the Rhode Island company, Daniele International Inc., Behravesh said. Further investigation — including the use of data from other victims' shopper cards — pointed to salami made by Daniele and, more specifically, the imported pepper it was coated in. That came from two spice suppliers in New York and New Jersey. All three companies have since recalled some products." - bob

That looks just like Nym, but she doesn't normally chase Kevin like that. ;) - Rachel Lea Fox

"Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural...Now, a city of nearly 2 million in the 1950s has declined to less than half that number. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots. " - bob

""The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years and pump new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods that would be cleared, the city would offer to relocate residents or buy them out. The city could use tax foreclosure to claim abandoned property and invoke eminent domain for those who refuse to leave, much as cities now do for freeway projects. - bob

i bet they could do it faster and more cheaply with gasoline :P - bob

I think Big Bird is yellow. - Paul Buchheit

Awesome though. - Paul Buchheit

Now we know what REALLY happened to Mr Hooper - Johnny

hey eagles value their privacy :) - Private Sanjeev