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From a CNN web page.
The 18ft high posters of the Nazi leader advertise a line of clothing for young people and adorn street corners and bus stops in Palermo, Sicily’s biggest city. The ads show the Fuhrer in a lurid pink uniform, with his swastika armband replaced with one bearing a bright red heart, above the slogan “Change Style – Don’t Follow Your Leader”. Many local people say the advertising campaign is offensive and have called for the posters to be taken down.
A city councillor with the centre-Left Democratic Party, Rosario Filoramo, has protested to the mayor of Palermo.
“The use of an image of a person responsible for the worst chapters of the last century is offensive to our country’s constitutional principles and to the sensitivities of citizens,” he said.
A council official, Fabrizio Ferrandelli, said: “Having Hitler’s face on a poster… cannot be passed off as an innocent advertising message. Seeing these posters in front of schools is an embarrassment.” But the advertising agency which came up with the idea said critics of the campaign were over-reacting.
The Hitler poster was a tongue-in-cheek way of encouraging young people not to follow the crowd in their fashion choices.
Well, Hitler was gay, wasn’t he?
Locals in a small Canadian town have been stumped by the appearance of a bizarre creature, which was dragged from a lake. The animal, which has a long hairy body with bald skin on its head, feet and face, has prompted wild internet speculation that it is a more evolved version of the famous ‘Montauk monster’. The creature was discovered by two nurses in the town of Kitchenuhmaykoosib in Ontario, Canada, while out on a walk with their dog. When the dog began sniffing in the lake, the two women started investigating, before the dog pulled the dead animal out.
After taking some photographs of the odd animal, the nurses left it alone. When locals decided to go back and retrieve the body, it has disappeared. The photographs have now been posted on a local website, with an explanation which reads: ‘This creature was first discovered by Sam the Dog, a local dog.
‘It was discovered first week of May in the creek section of town, hikers noticed Sam sniffing something in the water and they approached to see in what the Sam had detected and they noticed the creature in the water face down. ‘The dog jumped in the lake and pulled the creature to the rocks and dragged it out for the hikers to see and these are the photos they took.
‘The creature’s tail is like a rat’s tail and it is a foot long.’ There has been much speculation about what kind of species the animal is. The body of the creature appears to look something like an otter, while its face – complete with long fang-like teeth, bears a striking resemblance to a boar-like animal. Even the local police chief Donny Morris is baffled, saying: ‘What it is, I don’t know. I’m just as curious as everyone else.’
The pictures of the animal have caused mass speculation online, from bloggers who are all stumped as to what the creature could be.
Anyone like to speculate?
Click pic to embiggen
Scientists have created the world’s first synthetic life form in a landmark experiment that paves the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved. The controversial feat, which has occupied 20 scientists for more than 10 years at an estimated cost of $40m, was described by one researcher as “a defining moment in biology”.
Craig Venter, the pioneering US geneticist behind the experiment, said the achievement heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines.
However critics, including some religious groups, condemned the work, with one organisation warning that artificial organisms could escape into the wild and cause environmental havoc or be turned into biological weapons. Others said Venter was playing God.
The new organism is based on an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats, but at its core is an entirely synthetic genome that was constructed from chemicals in the laboratory.
The single-celled organism has four “watermarks” written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and help trace its descendants back to their creator, should they go astray.
Spectators to this must be like those who go to car races to see the wrecks. Only in this case pretty much everyone comes out of it needing some body work.
Okay kids, today’s activity is to go down to your local Pizza Hut, have the oven set for 261° and insert your body into it. The tips of your ears start to ignite. The backs of your arms scream. Your throat burns as if somebody had stuck a tiki torch down it. Your lips feel bitten by large, unseen raccoons. And you haven’t hit 30 seconds.
Now do it for 10 minutes or more, and that’s what it’s like to compete in quite possibly the world’s dumbest sport: the Sauna World Championships.
I know. I entered.
[…]
You’d be amazed at how much fun it is to watch a grown man come apart like a $9 sweater. A Belarusian started out sane, just sitting there. Every 30 seconds a pitiless stream of water came out from a ceiling shower in the center of the sauna and splashed on the molten-hot rocks, creating a 100% humidity level in the room that would melt gold. About two minutes in our man started rocking a little. At three his eyes started blinking oddly. At four he began twitching. At five his eyes got huge. At six he started swallowing each breath like a gulp of scorching soup. Then he started glancing around wildly, as if to say to the others, Are you mad? Don’t you see what’s happening? They’ve locked us in a Crock-Pot! He started wiping his eyes and mouth. He moved his hands out toward his thighs to rub them, then realized that’s not allowed and did so anyway, crazily, as though he were covered in lice. The judges flagged him once, then twice. Then he lurched for the door, and he was out. Sanity and cool air whooshed back into his brain, and suddenly he was normal and smiling again.
- Google event packs them in. Google TV shown. Looks like a howler to me. It’s all about the ads.
- Scientists have created life! Maybe not.
- Android 2.2 and 2.1 all over the news.
- What is hate speech?
- Is the iPad killing Mac sales? Nobody knows.
- Google stuck with dubious data.
- Sonic game delayed.
- New version of Flash out and about.
- FCC baffled by competition.
- A sun eats a planet.
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Hang in past 2:00 minutes when he starts reacting to the crowd. In your face Dave Grohl!
Obama today traveled with Mexican First Lady Margarita Zavala to the New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where a second-grade girl asked her about how immigration reform would impact her family.
“My mom… she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn’t have papers,” the girl said, sitting cross-legged on the gymnasium floor with her classmates, while Obama sat in a folding chair next to them. A large blue banner hanging behind them, adorned with the American and Mexican flags, read, “Welcome, Mrs. Obama! Bienvenidos, Sra. Zavala!”
“Yeah, well that’s something that we have to work on, right?” Obama said. “To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right? That’s exactly right.”
The little girl continued, “But my mom doesn’t have any papers.”
Obama replied, “Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that, and everybody’s got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens.”
President Obama today said he agreed with Mexican President Felipe Calderon that the Arizona law, which makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally, could be applied in a discriminatory fashion. He called it a “misdirected expression of frustration over our broken immigration system.”
Uncomfortable!
A federal judge has dismissed a plaintiff’s lawsuit against Apple that accused company employees of waiting like “vultures” to spy on her every time she used an Apple laptop to access the Internet.
Leslie Carr sought to recover $60 million for trauma, which she said kept her from publishing on the Web. She alleged, among other things, that each time she used the laptop to go online, “there would be a mass number of Apple employees waiting greedily like vultures to survey and monitor my life.”
But U.S. District Judge Richard Berman said the complaint “fails to state a plausible claim for relief. Where, as here, a complaint is asserting unrealistic and unsupportable claims, a court may dismiss it.”
Carr did not return a call seeking comment.
I heard Gizmodo offered her $10,000 for her laptop.
 
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Haven’t heard about this on the nightly news, have you?
On one hand, she was just doing her job as Solicitor General and this may not reflect her personal feelings or how she might rule when on the Court. On the other hand, what’s up with Obama promoting crapola like this?
According to an explosive special report on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s views on the First Amendment right to free speech, in September of 2009 Kagan encouraged the Court to adhere to a new philosophy on the First Amendment that would allow the government to censor posters, pamphlets, and TV and radio content–and the Internet.
In a stunning news report issued today by CNS, the following information was disclosed:
“The Government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern,” wrote Roberts. “Its theory, if accepted, would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations—as the major ones are. First Amendment rights could be confined to individuals, subverting the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy.”
Even liberal Justice Ginsberg questioned Kagan about the policy, inquiring as to whether or not the same principle could be used to ban books.
Click pic to embiggen
The producers have stated they won’t answer every question that’s been raised if for no other reason that that would take a twelve hour show. On the other hand, much has been answered during the last month. What do you think will happen as one of the most intelligent, densely packed mystery and unique science fiction shows ever ends? Whatever happens, I just hope it doesn’t wimp out like BSG did.
If you need to catch up with the show, here’s the episode guide at Lostpedia, the amazing resource on every conceivable, cross indexed detail about the show.
Australian customs officers have been given new powers to search incoming travellers’ laptops and mobile phones for pornography, a spokeswoman for the Australian sex industry says.
Fiona Patten, president of the Australian Sex Party, is demanding an inquiry into why a new question appears on Incoming Passenger Cards asking people if they are carrying “pornography”.
Patten said officials now had an unfettered right to examine travellers’ electronic devices, marking the beginning of a new era of official investigation into people’s private lives. She questioned whether it was appropriate to search people for legal R18+ and X18+ material.
[…]
Customs has not yet commented on Patten’s claims, with a spokesman saying a response was still being formulated.However, it is understood that the “pornography” question has appeared on Incoming Passenger Cards since September last year. The change was only spotted by Patten earlier this month and it had received little to no coverage in the media.
Colin Jacobs, chairman of the lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the change appeared to have sneaked under the radar “without any public consultation about the massive privacy issues”.
Snappy enough title?
- Google I/O conference underway with a lot of Google apologies.
- Facebook banned by Pakistan because Facebook created a contest to draw Muhammed.
- Installing Android on the iPhone unveiled.
- Germany has a criminal inquiry over Google spying.
- Climate change on the attack.
- Twitter app from Twitter will kill small companies.
- MSFT suing Salesforce.
- Hotmail back in the news. Why?
- Yahoo buys SEO content maker. Gak.
- HTC EVO cell phone in the news.
Show sponsored by e-Harmony. Get a date.
Go to www.eharmony.com
and use the code EHTECH for a great discount.
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and use the code EHTECH for a great discount.
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