Authorities in Ahoskie, North Carolina dropped a disturbing bombshell yesterday with the news that they had charged two employees of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) with 31 felony counts of animal cruelty.
PETA’s Andrew Cook and Adria Hinkle were arrested late Wednesday night after police saw them dump bags containing seven dead puppies and 11 other dead animals in a grocery store’s dumpster. Their PETA-owned van, seized by police, contained another 13 animal bodies.
[via bit-tech.net]
The Swiss parliament has reportedly passed a law to ban any violent videogames from going on sale within the country, with further proposals in the pipeline which could see all first-person shooters for adults being banned specifically.
Specifically the law calls for a ban on any videogame which “requires cruel acts of violence against humans and human-like creatures for in-game success“, according to GI.biz.
The new law was initially put forward last month and has just been passed into law, though the government is still in the process of deciding the specifics of how the law will operate and what exactly will and won’t be allowed. You’d think they’d establish that before that passed the motion though…
[via seattletimes.nwsource.com]
Retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan
A retired U.S. general says Dutch troops failed to defend against the 1995 genocide in the Bosnian war because the army was weakened, partly because it included openly gay soldiers.
The comment by John Sheehan, a former NATO commander who retired from the military in 1997, shocked some at a Senate Armed Services Committee, where Sheehan spoke in opposition to a proposal to allow gays to serve openly in the U.S. military. Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin told Sheehan he was “totally off-target.”
[via WorldNetDaily]
John Holdren
President Obama’s “science” czar, John Holdren, was co-author of a 2004 energy policy paper that recommended “cap and trade” legislation, including “clean coal” technology and $2 billion from the federal budget for construction of one or two new nuclear facilities.
WND has learned a co-author of the paper with Holdren is John Rowe, a financial bundler for President Obama’s 2008 campaign who serves as chairman of Exelon, the mega-utility owning 30 percent of all U.S. nuclear plants.
[via timesonline.co.uk]
England’s libel laws have been used to silence scientific critics of lie detection technology on which the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has spent £2.4 million.
An academic from Sweden will tell MPs today how a paper challenging the principles behind the voice risk analysis (VRA) system was withdrawn by his publisher after legal threats from its manufacturer.
In an interview with The Times before a House of Commons seminar on his case, Francisco Lacerda, professor of phonetics at Stockholm University, said that the case showed how English law was damaging science abroad as well as in the UK.
[via gizmodo.com]
It doesn’t matter if the machine you are using is a massive crane or a tiny smartphone: You will always curse in the same way when it crashes. The deafening noise, however, won’t be the same.
[via bbc.co.uk]]
The incident happened on a major Moscow motorway
Russia has launched a criminal inquiry following claims that traffic police used civilian motorists as a “human shield” to stop suspected criminals.
Several drivers were reportedly ordered to use their cars to form a barrier on a major Moscow motorway last Friday.
A vehicle driven by the suspected robbers smashed through the blockade minutes later and kept going. No-one was hurt but several cars were damaged.
The traffic police commander in charge has already been sacked.
[via dailymail.co.uk]
Some birds just like to stand out from the crowd.
And this all-black penguin on the South Atlantic island of Fortuna Bay is a ‘one in a zillion’ rarity experts say.
The bird on the South Georgian island, about 860 miles off the Falklands, is thought to suffer from a condition known as melanism, a mutation that turned it black.
After being shown the pictures by National Geographic magazine, Dr Allan Baker, of the University of Toronto, described them as ‘astonishing’.
Dark: The black penguin stands out from the crowd and has been hailed as 'astonishing'
[via consumerist.com]
Sarah had an unpleasant experience at her local movie theater, and sent a complaint e-mail to the company that runs it. We don’t know what response she expected, but it probably wasn’t a letter from a company vice president that began, “Drive to [a competing theater] and also go f*** yourself. If you don’t have money for entertainment, get a better job, and don’t pay for everything on your credit or check card.”
[via gizmodo.com]
A Cornell University professor analyzed 150 of the highest grossing movies of the last 70 years. The more recent the movie, he found, the closer it adhered to the mathematical formula that describes the human attention span.
In the 1990s, researchers at University of Texas in Austin determined that our attention spans could be described by the 1/f fluctuation, a pattern representing the ebb and flow of our concentration over a period of time. In a new study, professor James Cutting found that the more recent the blockbuster, the more closely the length of its shots followed that same fluctuation