Peruvian police: Gang killed people for their fat | Seattle Times Newspaper — Oh brother.

Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists.

Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn’t the only one doing such killings.

Mejia said two of the suspects were arrested carrying bottles of liquid human fat and told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter).

At a news conference, police showed reporters two bottles of fat recovered from the suspects and a photo of the rotting head of a 27-year-old male victim. Suspect Elmer Segundo Castillejos, 29, led police to the head, recovered in a coca-growing valley last month, Mejia said.

• Google Chrome OS made official. Some details follow.
• Win 7 sales booming.
• Sony to use Firefox on PS3.
• Palm phones go on sale.
• NSA backdoor? They say no.
• Al Gore in the news. This is a beaut.
• Best Buy starts Black Friday already.
• Dell Profits drop.

• Microsoft giving away beta copies of Office 2010. Worth a look.
• Also IE 9 floating around.
• Judge says Verizon ads OK.
• Call of Duty breaking all records.
• IBM makes a computer that simulates a cat’s brain! Meow.
• Google Chrome coming out and to be announced tomorrow.
• EU Ombudsman backing Intel.
• Controversy over new OED words.

Swine flu: One killer virus, three key questions : Nature News –This is a deadly dull report until you get near the end and read about this experimentation. If these labs were not constantly breached, I’d be happier.

A deadly line-up of viruses is locked up in the computer-controlled safes at the Jean Mérieux/INSERM biosecurity level four (BSL-4) facility in Lyon, France, including Ebola, Nipah, Lassa, Hendra and Marburg. And in the next few weeks, scientists working there are planning to manufacture a new resident. They hope to test whether the highly transmissible pandemic H1N1 virus could reassort with its deadlier cousin, the H5N1 avian flu, to make a virus with the worst properties of both.

Over the summer, Lina’s team has been using the BSL-4 facility to investigate the likelihood that pandemic H1N1 will acquire resistance to the front-line antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) through reassortment, and how easily these reassortments might spread. Resistance can emerge by spontaneous mutation, but given that seasonal H1N1 is already resistant to the drug and spreads easily, reassortment is perhaps the most likely way that pandemic H1N1 will acquire resistance — especially as seasonal H1NI and pandemic H1N1 are the same subtype. Since the start of the pandemic, Tamiflu-resistant strains have sporadically appeared in several countries but none has yet gained a foothold. That they haven’t arisen more often or spread more easily may be because there is little seasonal H1N1 circulating, as pandemic H1N1 is outcompeting it — a large number of co-infections are needed for transmissible reassortments to arise.

Airport rules changed after Ron Paul aide detained – Washington Times — The TSA has defended this action, now seeing it will lose in court relents. The audio is below. It’s unfortunate that people like this have no regard for the real laws of the USA. This situation was essentially false imprisonment and the TSA officials should be indicted.

An angry aide to Rep. Ron Paul, an iPhone and $4,700 in cash have forced the Transportation Security Administration to quietly issue two new rules telling its airport screeners they can only conduct searches related to airplane safety.

In response, the American Civil Liberties Union is dropping its lawsuit on behalf of Steve Bierfeldt, the man who was detained in March and who recorded the confrontation on his iPhone as TSA and local police officers spent half an hour demanding answers as to why he was carrying the money through Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.

The new rules, issuedin September and October, tell officers “screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security” and that large amounts of cash don’t qualify as suspicious for purposes of safety.

“We had been hearing of so many reports of TSA screeners engaging in wide-ranging fishing expeditions for illegal activities,” said Ben Wizner, a staff lawyer for the ACLU, pointing to reports of officers scanning pill-bottle labels to see whether the passenger was the person who obtained the prescription as one example.

He said screeners get a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches, strictly to keep weapons and explosives off planes, not to help police enforce other laws.

This was a captured tease run by WNBC in NYC. In it they use the book cover Going Rouge — An American Nightmare. Apparently the staff switched the graphic at the end of the tease. Nobody in NY seemed to notice.

Caught by Ben Gottesman for Dvorak Uncensored.

• New idea: YouTube direct opens. You’ll love this story.
• US and China to do a space joint venture.
• Dell goes green with bamboo. Where does this bamboo come from?
• We are entering the age of cyberwar? Oh no!
• China scams Microsoft over intellectual property. Huh?
• Wal-Mart dumping all sorts of things in a massive sale.
• HP goes thin-client.

Morning Bell: The Fake Jobs of Obama’s Failed Stimulus » The Foundry — Fake jobs, fake districts. The work of fake experts.

Forget everything bad you’ve ever heard about President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus. Combing through the data on the $18 million Recovery.gov website, you’ll find tons of Obama stimulus success stories from across the country. In Minnesota’s 57th Congressional District, 35 jobs have been saved or created using $404,340 in stimulus funds. In New Mexico’s 22nd Congressional District, 25 jobs have been saved or created using $61,000 in stimulus cash. And in Arizona’s fighting 15th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending.

The it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-our-tax-dollars-at-stake punch line here is that none of the above Congressional Districts actually exist. Yet those jobs “created or saved” claims still sit on the Obama administration’s official “transparency and accountability” website Recovery.gov. As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso points out, it would have been nearly costless for the Recovery.gov site designers to limit the input fields so that non-existent Congressional Districts never made it into the public domain, but for whatever reason the Obama administration chose otherwise. Defending the fake data on his website, Recovery.gov Communications Director Ed Pound told ABC News: “We report what the recipients submit to us.

Reader/Listener Anatoly N. writes the following note regarding the banning of this game in Russia:
John, please watch this and tell me this game should be available in Russia. Bear in mind that in Russia we don’t have age differentiated rating for games & movies it’s our fault, i know.Also picture that game’s action is taking place in “US airport named after Osama Bin Laden”. But at 1:27 in the clip it says “Zakhaev International Airport, Moscow, Russia”. There is no such airport. It’s obviously named after Akhmed Zakayev the Chechen ex Prime Minister accused by Russia of terrorism. And even if we don’t care about this crap, this scene should not be in the game anyway. It’s too cruel.

This scene is ridiculously sick, I agree. But if you can actually watch it, it makes you cringe because there are too many airports that are crawling with lots of machine-gun toting security forces. Kind of creepy to think about what would happen if one went berserk.

• Android all over the news with contradictory stories.
• MSFT at risk.
• Nokia and Palm deal creating a stir even though there is no deal yet.
• Eqypt first country to go Arabic with web domains.
• 1/2 of Teens talk on phone while driving. 1/2 of teens apparently lie.
• Cray has fastest supercomputer again.
• Russia banning games.
• Semiconductors to lead us to the promised land.

Crazy Days and Nights: Bill Gates & Strippers – Who Knew — So much for anonymity at these joints. This is pretty funny anyway.

When I think of Bill Gates I somehow don’t picture him heading over to Scores and getting lap dances all night. I guess I was wrong though because Bill loves the strippers and is a really big tipper. Good for him. The former owner of Scores strip club is in the process of writing a book and in it he gives some scoop about some of the clients who have walked through the doors of the strip club.

Found by Jennifer Lavin.