Should you be required by law to pay a gratuity if you don’t think the restaurant’s service was worth it? The police in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania think so, and they arrested two college students for refusing to pay a $16.35 tip over what they claim was poor service.

Philly.com – Nov. 19, 2009:

“You can’t give us terrible, terrible service and expect a tip,” said Pope, a 22-year-old Moravian College senior who’s a Pottsville native, according to the Lehigh Valley Express-Times.

They had to find their own napkins and cutlery while their waitress caught a smoke, had to ask the bar for soda refills, and had to wait over an hour for salad and wings, they told NBC10.

The pub, which was very busy that night, took the $73, but then called the cops, who treated the matter as a theft.

Washington Post- Nov. 17, 2009:

The nation’s economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat.

At a time when rising poverty, widespread unemployment and other effects of the recession have been well documented, the report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides the government’s first detailed portrait of the toll that the faltering economy has taken on Americans’ access to food.

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages — and, in some cases, outright hunger — identified in the report startled even the nation’s leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens.

Former Alaska Governor lashed out at the Associated Press Sunday for doing a fact-check on her memoir, “Going Rogue.”

“Amazingly, but not surprisingly, the AP somehow nabbed a copy of the book before it was released,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “They’re now erroneously reporting on the book’s contents and are repeating many of the same things they spewed during the campaign and afterwards. We’ve heard 11 writers are engaged in this opposition research, er, “fact checking” research!”

The AP reported that Palin’s account often contradicted her record as well as current events. Her depiction of the McCain campaign is also frequently at odds with internal campaign emails.

Does anyone else remember the old days when journalists were expected to fact-check stories?

At a UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, anti-censorship group Open Net Initiative was startled by a demand from UN officials to remove a poster mentioning Chinese Net censorship. When ONI refused the request, security personnel arrived and took away the poster. The group was promoting a new book, Access Controlled, a survey of Internet censorship, filtering, and online surveillance. A witness said, “The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many.”

Bill Gates said on Wednesday he believes Wall Street pay is “often too high” and that U.S. government ownership of American International Group Inc worries him because it has devalued the giant insurer.

The billionaire Microsoft founder, who retired in 2008 to concentrate on philanthropy, blamed a 1993 U.S. law that capped executive salaries at $1 million and warned that further bids to try limit Wall Street pay could also backfire.

“It was a bad milestone in controlling executive salaries when that $1 million cap went on,” Gates told a discussion on philanthropy at the 92nd Street Y cultural and community center in New York City.

“The compensation problem is a very interesting problem. I do think compensation is often too high, but it’s a very tough problem to solve,” said Gates, who was also ranked by Forbes on Wednesday as the 10th most powerful person in the world.

The $1 million limit on salaries encouraged companies to instead give executives lucrative stock options, sending pay to vast new heights.

Fewer than one in eight British men (12 per cent) and just three in 20 women (15 per cent) who have applied to BeautifulPeople.com have been accepted as members.

Existing members of the website rate how attractive potential members are over a 48 hour provisional period, when applicants upload a recent photograph and a short personal profile.

They are rated by members of the opposite sex, who have four options to describe how attractive they think the hopeful is – ‘Yes definitely’, ‘Hmmm yes, OK’, ‘Hmmm no, not really’ and ‘NO definitely NOT’.

Swedish men have proved the most successful applicants, with two-thirds (65 per cent) of those putting themselves forward being accepted.

Norwegian women are considered the most beautiful with more than three-quarters (76 per cent) making the grade.

Since the website was opened to UK members 295,000 people have applied, with only 35,000 being approved.

The website was founded in 2002 in Denmark and since then it has spread to other countries – becoming available in the UK in April 2005.

The ‘elite dating site for beautiful people only’, went live across the globe on 26 October this year. Over the past two weeks, the site has rejected nearly 1.8 million people from 190 countries.

Yeah, I realize Mike Myers is Canadian. But Austin Powers is a British character, so he stays.

A retirement community in Largo, Florida is fighting to evict six-year-old Kimberly Broffman from the home of her grandparents Jimmy and Judie Stottler, the only parents she’s ever known. According to the development’s bylaws, all residents must be older than 55.

Kimberly is the only person expected to vacate the home.

Kimberly’s grandparents have tried selling their house to leave the neighborhood, but because of the crash in the housing market, there are no buyers. They have lowered the price from $225,000 to $129,000.

The fight between Kimberly’s grandparents and the community has been going on for years, but soon a judge will decide if the girl must leave. According to NBC News, there is a real possibility that she could be placed in state foster care.

Huffington Post – 10-21-09:

Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine.

Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem.

Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.

The Times – October 19, 2009:

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

But, as Professor Boyd Swinburn, director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, says: “This is provocative in many ways . . . but my concern is that if we put the emphasis on exercise we are unlikely to tackle the obesity problem as we are not driving at the root cause.”

The idea that exercise will help to shed pounds is fairly recent — emerging at the same time that obesity began to boom in the 1980s.

“Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of well-known computer security company Kaspersky Labs, is calling for an end to the anonymity of the Internet, and for the creation of mandatory ‘Internet passports’ for anyone who wishes to browse the Web. Says Kaspersky, ‘Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport … the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public, and it was wrong … to introduce it in the same way.’ He calls anonymity ‘the Internet’s biggest security vulnerability’ and thinks any country that doesn’t follow this regime should be ‘cut off.’ The EFF objects, and it’s likely that they won’t be the only ones.”

“New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently allow spyware to be installed without authorization. ‘The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means.’ There have also been proposals to extend the exemptions granted to telecom providers to include the installation of programs without the user’s express consent, which Geist says will ‘leave the door open to private, surreptitious surveillance.’”

To the government he complains,

You’ve ignored us, because there’s 50,000 of us and 300 million voters. You’ve ignored us.

Think about that. Brooks is admitting that the use of file sharing is widespread. He acknowledges that everyone is doing it. But yet he wants the government to crack down on every single person in the US so that he can earn a few million more a year.

That’s some fricken balls! I almost feel like I should give him some credit for being so completely self-centered. It’s one thing to complain, “My family is starving so I need government help to feed my kids.” It’s another thing to complain, “Why won’t the government help me so I can buy my fourth fricken mansion?!”

Apparently Garth doesn’t know this, but it’s common knowledge to the rest of the world that it’s already against the law to use P2P to infringe copyrights. The punishment for such use goes way beyond any physical crime. If I go to Walmart, stick a gun in someone’s face, and steal a CD, the most I’ll have to pay monetarily is for the price of that one CD, about 20 bucks. However, if I download a CD worth of music, I’d have to pay millions of dollars.

But yet that draconian law is not enough for Garthy. He wants more! Does he want incarceration? For all 300 million of us? Apparently so. Apparently, his “lost” money, which has nothing to do with P2P, is worth more than the liberty of every citizen in the US.

But this isn’t the first time Brooks put his bank account above the rights of citizens. He also claims that selling used CDs is stealing. I’m not making this up. According to Brooks, the simple act of selling a used CD is a criminal act. Of course he’s wrong. But your right to sell your stuff is nothing compared to Brooks’ right to buy a mansion.

Of course the main reason he’s having trouble selling CDs is that his time in the spotlight is over. When rock and roll killed off the careers of the vocalists from the 50s, Sinatra, Mathis, Cole, to name a few, those guys didn’t ask the government to stop the switch to rock music. They graciously accepted their time was over and moved on. It’s time for washed up has-beens like Brooks to do the same.

Artists of today realize that the net is not a hindrance to making great music, but is actually a great tool for connecting with fans.