The Demise of Fois Gras "SB 1520" comes into effect - banning the production and sale of foie gras - this weekend.

On the menu apparently, foie gras doughnuts, shaved foie gras piled in drifts and, says the paper, so much "foie gras ice cream" has been doled out it "actually became a cliche.

via Sky News 07/01/12

Man Plagued by Porn-Induced Headaches‎

 A man plagued by porn-induced headaches has to take painkillers 30 minutes before watching the X-rated movies, according to a case study

via  First Coast News  6/29/12

What kind of valuable evolutionary mutation is this?

When it comes to building hardware, Google is ready to take the plunge - as it showed Wednesday, when skydivers equipped with the company's augmented-reality glasses leaped out of a blimp passing over the Moscone convention center.

via SF Chron 6/27

The three party system? The Democrats, Republicans and The Brotherhood

BuzzFeed - Latest 6/24/12 1:10 PM

A lot has happened in Egypt over the last 18 months, culminating in the naming today of a new president. Here's what you need to know.

Civil Rights and Adidas' shackle shoe

Withdrawal of Adidas 'shackle' shoe draws support, criticism

3:54 PM, June 19, 2012
via Detroit Free Press

Obama drums up support

Obama immigration policy draws 64% support

Daily Kos 6/19/12 7:19 AM rss@dailykos.com (Laura Clawson) Barack Obama DREAM Act immigration

and from Reid:
USA Today:“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked baseball phenom Bryce Harper today when he was talking to the news media about immigration.”

Quote "That's a Clowns question bro!"

Does not have time for jebbah jabbah

19 June 2012 Last updated at 20:37 ET

 Wikileaks' Julian Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador embassy Mr Assange is facing extradition to Sweden from Britain for questioning over alleged sex crimes

Julian Assange is seeking political asylum at Ecuador's London embassy, the country's foreign minister has said. "Ecuador is studying and analysing the request," Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters in Quito.

Last week the UK's Supreme Court dismissed Mr Assange's bid to reopen an appeal against extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes he denies.

via BBC uk

Tom Bosley & Leon Panetta

Seprated at birth?

RIP Momento Mori Rodney King 6/17

Odd that on the anniversary of the riots Rodney King passes...

Beyoncé | Lady GaGa@iFreakum Rodney King was the reason my parents had a 3 VCR's when the L.A. riots happened.

via twitter

First Painters May Have Been Neanderthal, Not Human Wired News 6/14/12 11:10 AM Brandon Keim European cave paintings are older than previously thought, raising the possibility that Neanderthals rather than humans were the earliest painters.
 via Wired

'Moneyball' Godfather Bill James Tackles Politics In Super PAC Age The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com 6/14/12 9:01 PM The Huffington Post News Editors http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/ WASHINGTON -- A political candidate being dramatically outspent by his opponent has few options. He can pin his hopes on a strong debate performance, dig up dirt on the opposition, or cut a particularly buzz-worthy television ad. Or he can do what other industries, led by Major League Baseball, have done before: worship at the altar of Bill James. James is the high priest of baseball number-crunching. In 1977, he began publishing the "Bill James Baseball Abstracts," which paved the way for "sabermetrics," a system of statistical analysis that fundamentally transformed the sport. In 2006, Time magazine named James one of the 100 most influential people in the world. If Billy Beane, manager of the perennially low-budget Oakland Athletics, is the face of "Moneyball" -- the ethos of small-budget teams competing against well-funded opponents -- James is its brain.

via Huff Post

Jury Sides With Costner in BP Spill Lawsuit NYT > Home Page 6/14/12 9:29 PM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BP Plc|BP|NYSE A federal jury late Thursday rejected claims that Kevin Costner and his business partner duped fellow actor Stephen Baldwin and a friend out of millions of dollars from a BP contract for using oil cleanup devices in the aftermath of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill.

via NY Times

CHENEY AND OBAMA COUSINS-EVERY FAMILY HAS A BLACK SHEEP

updated 10/17/2007 7:27:24 AM ET Print Font: WASHINGTON — Though they may spar across the political aisle, Vice President Dick Cheney is close enough to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to call him “cousin.” Eighth cousin, that is. Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, revealed this tantalizing bit of political trivia during a television interview Tuesday. She said she uncovered the long-ago ties between the two while researching her ancestry for her latest book, “Blue Skies, No Fences,” a memoir about growing up in Wyoming. “This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor ... could be responsible down the family lines ...

via AP

Leaks Could Sink Obama White House The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com 6/12/12 4:20 PM The Huffington Post News Editors http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/ By opening an investigation into the leaks of classified information, the Obama White House appears to be entering the kind of perilous Fill-In-The-Blank-Gate terrain that has eventually engulfed most administrations in the modern era. Read More... More on Barack Obama

George Zimmerman's Wife Charged With Perjury NYT > Home Page 6/12/12 4:41 PM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS American Express Company|AXP|NYSE The wife of Trayvon Martin's shooter was charged with perjury Tuesday, accused of lying when she told a judge that the couple had limited funds during a hearing that resulted in her husband being released on $150,000 bond.

VIA NY TIMES

Advertising Is Good For You

BANK ROBBERS DON'T MAKE A LOT OF MONEY

 By Thomas H. Maugh II June 12, 2012, 8:20 a.m.

The average take in a British bank robbery is a modest 12,706.60 euros (about $15,887) per person, compared with an average of $4,330 in U.S. bank robberies. Given that the average U.K.wage for fully employed people in Britain is about 26,000 euros, a bank robbery "will give him a modest lifestyle for no more than 6 months." If he robs two, he will still have only a modest lifestyle. Four robberies, and the odds are excellent that he will land in jail. "As a profitable occupation, bank robbery leaves a lot to be desired," the authors wrote. (A similar analysis of drug dealing in the book "Freakonomics" explains why most low-level dealers live with their mothers: The activity is so unprofitable that they cannot afford a place of their own.) That may be why bank robberies are declining in the U.K. and the U.S.

via LA Times

SO MY BUCK SIXTY FIVE GOES TO U.S. JOB CREATION NOOOT GREEN COFFEE IN THE THIRD WORLD?

By Tiffany Hsu June 12, 2012, 10:55 a.m.

Starbucks Corp. has a new line of merchandise that, in line with the conscientious capitalism efforts at several major companies, it said will be used to help support American jobs. The coffee giant will sell a limited-edition mug, tumbler and bag of coffee – all made domestically – to raise money for its Create Jobs for USA fund.

via LA Times

Economic Accountability: Economic transparency is required. Suppliers must submit evidence of payments made throughout the coffee supply chain to demonstrate how much of the price that Starbucks pays for green (unroasted) coffee gets to the farmer.

via Starbucks.com

A parasitic mite has helped a virus wipe out billions of honeybees across the globe, say scientists.

A team studying honeybees in Hawaii found that the Varroa mite helped spread a particularly nasty strain of a disease called deformed wing virus.

This has led to "one of the most widely-distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet".

The findings are reported in the journal Science.

Victoria Gill reports.

Canadian Cop Says "Cannibal Killer" Was in L.A. at Time of "Hollywood Hills Body Parts" Murder

 
Magnotta (left) and Medellin

While law enforcement sources refuted anysuggested connection between Canadian "cannibal killer" Luka Magnotta and the murder and dismemberment of a man whose severed head was found in the Hollywood Hills, today a Montreal officer is saying differently.

The Toronto Sun reports that "Montreal police Cmdr. Ian Lafreniere confirmed Thursday that the LAPD is probing possible links between Magnotta and the murder of Hervey Medellin, a gay former flight attendant," adding, "Lafreniere said Magnotta was in Los Angeles at the time of Medellin's murder."

Earlier this week, an item in the New York Observer attempted to link online activity on various sites with Magnotta; while some have been disproved, there is still the possibility some of the internet postings from the time put Magnotta in L.A., including that " Magnotta advertised his services on Facebook as an L.A.-based masseuse" at the time of the Medellin murder in January 2012. Additionally, "a Los-Angeles-based pimp claims to have hired Magnotta to work as a prostitute in January."

Magnotta, a gay adult performer, escort, and kitten killer, was arrested in Berlin, Germany this week. Magnotta stands accused of killing Lin Jun, a Chinese student living and studying in Montreal. The killer sent various body parts from Lin's corpse to various law enforcement and political offices in Canada, and a video verified as authentic by police was posted online of the killing.

The news that Canadian authorities put Magnotta in L.A. in January definitely contradicts the anonymous law enforcement sources who spoke to the L.A. Times Wednesday to say the only connection between the two cases was how bizarre they both are.

The Los Angeles Police Department have made no official statement on any Magnotta connection to the Medellin case, which remains unsolved. According to KTLA, the LAPD are investigating the connection.

Mexico's Once Dominant Party Poised For A Comeback

 NPR Topics: News 6/7/12 1:11 PM

The front-runner in Mexico's presidential race says his party, the PRI, has changed since it was ousted from power in 2000. Many Mexicans yearn for the peace and order the country experienced under PRI rule. But others worry about the rampant corruption that brought about the party's downfall.
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Ray Bradbury, the American author of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, died today. He was 91 years old.

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, and he spent part of his teen years in Los Angeles, where he graduated high school. He got a start in publishing as a newspaper hawker, and in 1943 he became a full-time writer. Bradbury’s first published works consisted of short stories, a form he would master over the course of his career. The prolific writer also wrote novels, essays, plays, teleplays, and poetry.

Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles was his first big break in science fiction publishing. The series of short stories told tales of Earth’s inhabitants colonizing the planet Mars, and Bradbury collected them into a single work. He also sold The Illustrated Man at the same time as The Martian Chronicles; both works brought him commercial success. In 1953, Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. The book’s vision of a totalitarian state that burns books proved to be a provocative ideological work that evoked strong memories of Nazi Germany during World War II and pitted a strong ideology of freedom of ideas against totalitarian regimes.

The gourd, originally used to store gunpowder, was extensively decorated on the outside with a flame tool. Burned into its surface is the text: “Maximilien Bourdaloue on January 21st, dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his beheading.” “It is described in contemporaneous accounts that there was a lot of blood in the scaffold after the beheading and that, in fact, many people went there to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood,” Carles Lalueza-Fox, lead author of the study and a researcher at Spain’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, told Discovery News. The handkerchief is now missing from the gourd, but Lalueza-Fox and his team identified a brownish substance on the interior of the dried squash. Biochemical tests determined that the substance was dried blood.

via MSNBC   10/25/2010 11:01:13 AM ET

Unemployment Figures...

Barack Obama attacks Congress over latest low employment numbers - The Guardian World News 6/2/12 7:58 AM Paul Harris

After a week of bad figures, president says failure to pass last year's jobs bill in its entirety has slowed economic recovery President Barack Obama attempted to shift blame for a shock rise in America's unemployment on Saturday, attacking an obstructionist Congress for failing to pass job-creation measures.

The bad economic data, which showed the US had created just 69,000 new jobs in April and unemployment had gone up for the first time in a year to 8.2 percent, contributed to a worldwide fall in stock prices. The news was far worse than expectations and stands a chance of significantly impacting on Obama's chances of re-election as both he and his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, believe the health of the US economy will be the key factor in voters' minds come November. In his weekly address, Obama spoke from the floor of a Minnesota factory where he held a campaign rally late last week. He attacked Congress for only passing a few parts of a planned jobs bill last year, rather than the whole package. "There's no excuse for that. Not when so many people are still looking for work, not when so many people are struggling to pay the bills," he said.

Obama acknowledged that the US economy was struggling and pinned the blame on fallout from the ongoing eurozone crisis and high gas prices which had hit US consumer confidence. "The economy is growing again, but it is not growing fast enough. Our businesses have created almost 4.3m new jobs over the pas 27 months, but as we learned in this week's jobs report, we're not creating them fast enough," Obama said.
Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, have criticised the jobs bill as an example of out-of-control government spending at a time when the country faces a fiscal crisis and needs to cut back. They have now seized on the latest job numbers to attack Obama's record on the economy.

Romney said the poor figures were down to Obama's policies. "The president's policies and his handling of the economy has been dealt a harsh indictment," he told a television interviewer after the numbers were released. "In many respects their policies have it harder for the economy to recover." Romney's campaign is now focusing its appeal on the idea that economic growth will tick upwards if there is a change at the White House. With the 2012 election in full swing now, and expected to be fought over the economy, latest polls show a close race. The Real Clear Politics rolling average of polls has Obama with a narrow lead of just two points over Romney. But in some of the latest surveys, such as the Rasmussen Tracking Poll, Romney has moved into a lead.

via The Guardian World News 6/2/12 7:58 AM

Emperor of Banana Republic- Sam the Banana Man

When Sam emigrated from Russia in 1891, he was tall, intelligent, ambitious and poor. Within a few years, he’d seen his first banana, and that made all the difference. By 1899, Sam was a familiar figure on wharves in Mobile and New Orleans, where he bought the freckled bananas other traders dumped as too ripe. For Zemurray, a huge man who could swear in five languages, hustle was the name of the game. Who says you can’t get ‘em to market in time? Schmucks!

When Sam died in the grandest house in New Orleans in 1961, he was among the most powerful men in the country, the longtime head of United Fruit, the global behemoth that ruled in Central and South America for 50 years. In between, he lived and fought in cities and jungles, cl

eared fields, planted stems, smuggled weapons, fomented revolutions, advised presidents, built towns. When thwarted by the government of Honduras in 1911, he recruited a mercenary army in the dives of New Orleans’ French Quarter and went to war, replacing the Honduran president with one more to his liking. United Fruit repeated the trick in Guatemala in 1954, this time working with the CIA.

via Salon [book review of The Fish That Ate The Whale by Rich Cohen]

The Rochester boy skipped school Friday to attend Obama's visit to a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley with his dad. "I had a chance to shake his hand. The President said, 'You must be missing school,'" Tyler told local station KARE. When Tyler admitted to ditching, Obama pulled out a golden slip of his official stationary — stamped with his presidential seal — and scrawled the missive with a felt-tipped black pen. News footage of the meet-up showed Tyler in a checkered hoodie beaming from behind a barricade while Obama jotted down the excuse. "Pretty cool. And it's like, oh, I'm famous! It's really cool," Tyler told ABC's "Good Morning America," while showing off the now-framed note. He said he'll show it to Mr. Ackerman on Monday.
via NY Daily News 6/3 2012

Elizabeth Warren Gains Democratic Endorsement in Senate Campaign NYT > Home Page 6/2/12 8:53 PM By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE Warren, Elizabeth Elections Native Americans Massachusetts Senate DeFranco, Marisa Brown, Scott P United States Politics and Government After a month of floundering, Elizabeth Warren, the embattled Senate candidate in Massachusetts, gained the Democratic endorsement, avoiding a primary fight.

The Liberal Republican --Bush

Jeb Bush accepts reality, rejects VP Salon.com 6/1/12 1:22 PM Politics All Salon Jeb Bush Comments Last summer, in one of the first Republican presidential debates, every single candidate on the stage said they would turn down a hypothetical deal with Democrats to cut $10 dollars in government spending for just $1 in tax increases. Today, former Florida governor Jeb Bush broke with his party’s anti-tax theology when he told House Republicans that he would happily take that deal. “If you could bring to me a majority of people to say that we’re going to have $10 in spending cuts for $1 of revenue enhancement -- put me in, coach,” Bush told the House Budget Committee, chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. And in perhaps an even greater conservative sacrilege, Bush told the committee that he has repeatedly rejected signing Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge. Virtually every Republican in the country running for everything from president to state representative has signed Norquist’s pledge, which holds lawmakers to a hardline anti-tax policy that doesn’t even allow for the expiration of corporate subsidies, like those for ethanol production. Continue Reading...