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RAVENA — Jerry Stolfi houses Jesus above his kitchen’s stovetop exhaust fan, inside a drab brown cupboard he calls a shrine.
“I hope he doesn’t get lonely in there, you know?” says Stolfi, 49.
“He” is the coffee stain, on a mason jar drinking mug, in which Stolfi sees a bearded image of Jesus Christ bearing a crown of thorns. The image, smaller than a square inch, appeared to him April 29, after he had finished drinking coffee from the jar, which bears the residue of dried coffee and cream.
“It doesn’t smell, though, and I will never be washing it,” he said.
CNSNews.com – Pelosi Won’t Give Public a Week to Review Text of Health-Care Bill Before House Votes on It — Whatever happened to the public review promises made by the Democrats? What gives?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi D.-Calif. will not give the public a week to review the final text of a health-care reform bill before it is voted on later this year.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid D.-Nev. has also declined to commit to giving the public a week to read and consider the final health-care bill.
At her press briefing on Thursday, Pelosi was asked whether the health-care bill would be handled differently than the stimulus bill, which came up in February. The 1,071-page final text of that bill was posted on the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site late on a Thursday night and then voted on the next day.
- Standardized mobile phone charger now a worldwide phenomenon. Nokia leads the way.
- Palm kills homemade apps. Why?
- Sony thinking about PSP phone. Sounds like nGage to me.
- Intel working seriously on SSD.
- Germans not interested in the Kindle.
- Google voice getting a lot of ink.
- Adam Savage gets free phone service.
- MSFT fiddling around with Win 7 marketing. Will they ever learn?
- Kid humiliated by Walkman.
- Wikipedia in on blackout of certain news.
- HD-DVD still beating Blu-ray according to the NYT.
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
Al Jazeera – Iran recount gives Ahmadinejad win — It’s official!
Iran’s Guardian Council has confirmed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s president, following a partial recount of votes from the disputed presidential election of June 12.
State television said that Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the council’s secretary, had presented Sadegh Mahsouli, the minister of the interior, with a letter saying it had approved the election after a recount of 10 per cent of the ballots.
“The secretary of the Guardian Council in a letter to the interior minister announced the final decision of the Council … and declares the approval of the accuracy of the results of … the presidential election,” IRIB, the Iranian broadcaster, said.
The iPhone 3G may, at least for some users, have an additional, undocumented feature: It can be used to toast bread.
Reports are coming in that the new, million-selling iPhone is suffering from overheating issues. The handsets are getting so warm, in fact, that the plastic cases of the white models are discoloring to pink.
It’s not just anonymous forum posters, either. Melissa J. Perenson of PC World has a toasty 3GS, too:
And at some point, I became aware the handset had become very hot. Very, very hot — not just on the back, but the entire length of the front face, too. I was using a game, and then later the Web browser for reading the news about Michael Jackson, all over a Wi-Fi connection while plugged in. And in those circumstances, well…toasty doesn’t even describe how surprisingly hot it got. It was too hot to even put the phone against my face.
Other reports across the web, including the Apple discussion forums, seem to point at GPS use and playing games as the culprits. Of course, there are problems with product launches all the time, and Apple users tend to be more vocal than most. And Apple is notoriously reticent to admit anything is wrong, Remember the first gen white MacBooks that turned yellow on top?
So much for Quality Control.
Thanks to sargasso!
 “Hero”
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A SKIER who fell into a crevasse was saved from plummeting 700ft to his death by his mobile phone. David Fitzherbert got wedged between two rocks due to the ½inch-wide Blackberry in his breast pocket. Incredibly, the device still worked after keeping him stuck for TWO HOURS until he was rescued.
David, 52, was skiing off-piste down a glacier in the Matterhorn and Monterosa peaks in Switzerland when the snow gave way. The finance worker said: “The snow gave way beneath me and I fell down a very deep crevasse.
“After 70 feet it narrowed and I became stuck like a cork in a bottle between the walls. “Fortunately the extra inches of the Blackberry were enough to block the fall.” David broke his jaw, smashed his teeth, cracked a bone in his chest and nearly tore his nose off. His mountain guide made a distress call, and a mountain rescue team came to dig him out.
Married David, of Kensington, West London, said: “I was stuck so fast they had to get a drill to dig away at the ice around me. I was eventually winched out by the helicopter rescue team.” He was flown to hospital suffering extreme hypothermia and concussion in Swiss capital Bern, where surgeons reattached his nose. David spent ten days in hospital – using the Blackberry to call his wife in the UK. He said: “It was still working well enough for me to tell her I was alive. I couldn’t believe it.” On his return to the UK David wrote to Vodafone, who supplied the Blackberry, to thank them.
I just knew that someday, if I looked hard enough, I would find a positive story about a cell phone.
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
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A federal judge sentenced Bernard L. Madoff to 150 years in prison on Monday for operating a huge Ponzi scheme that devastated thousands of people, calling his crimes “extraordinarily evil.”
In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term.
“Objectively speaking, the fraud here was staggering,” the judge said. “It spanned more than 20 years.”
20 years of the SEC abdicating their chartered responsibility.
General Electric, the world’s largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key rescue programs for banks.
At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government.
The company did not initially qualify for the program, under which the government sought to unfreeze credit markets by guaranteeing debt sold by banking firms. But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.
As a result, GE has joined major banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for their operations at lower interest rates. Public records show that GE Capital, the company’s massive financing arm, has issued nearly a quarter of the $340 billion in debt backed by the program, which is known as the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, or TLGP. The government’s actions have been “powerful and helpful” to the company, GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt acknowledged in December.
GE’s finance arm is not classified as a bank. Rather, it worked its way into the rescue program by owning two relatively small Utah banking institutions, illustrating how the loopholes in the U.S. regulatory system are manifest in the government’s historic intervention in the financial crisis.
“We’d like to regulate companies according to what they do, rather than what they call themselves or how they charter themselves,” said Andrew Williams, a Treasury spokesman.
Who doesn’t believe that if the government closes this loophole others will be found or created by bribe… er, um, campaign fund hungry politicians for big companies?
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Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
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| Demonstrator tries to escape police |
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, angry at the opening of a parking lot on the Jewish sabbath, clashed with police separating them from secular Jerusalem residents who held a protest on Saturday in support of the move.
Police moved in to separate the demonstrators after ultra-Orthodox Jews started hurling stones and vegetables. A police spokesman said 24 people were arrested and four policemen suffered minor injuries.
Tensions have been brewing in the city over plans by Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor, Nir Barkat, to reopen a parking lot on Saturday, a move that could draw more traffic into the city on the Jewish sabbath…
Tensions reached a new peak on Friday when thousands of Ultra-Orthodox Jews walked through a main street in the city in protest at Barkat’s decision. Some scuffled with journalists and photographers covering the march…
Barkat became mayor in November after beating ultra-Orthodox Uri Lupolianski. He ran on a platform of reversing an exodus of secular young Jews who leave to cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa in search of better job opportunities.
The intolerance of fundamentalist religions confounds me. When push comes to shove, they are as violent, cruel and egregious as any other leftover cave-dweller.
Huh. I wonder…
With this groundbreaking research, could someone use it to, say, make money by creating magazines and Interwebitube sites that cater to men who like looking at women who look like…
What’s that? There already are?
Huh.
When it comes to the question of who’s hot or not, research has found that beauty is skin deep for men and in the eye of the beholder for women.
The study by psychologists from a North Carolina university has found that men are much more likely to come to a consensus when defining what they find attractive in the opposite sex.
The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, could mean it’s not just money and security that lures many attractive young women to far less attractive older men, The Courier-Mail reports.
Wake Forest University researcher Dustin Wood polled 4000 men and women, aged 18 to more than 70, on how attractive they found the subjects of a range of photographs of people of the opposite sex aged 18 to 25.
The study, perhaps not surprisingly, found men’s view on the attractiveness of different women was defined by physical features, with women who looked thin and seductive getting the highest ratings.
Men also were particularly attracted to women who appeared confident.
Women showed a more diverse range of responses, with some rating particular men very attractive while other women found the same men not attractive at all.
Guatemalan fears a tweet will make him a jailbird | KOMO News – Seattle, Washington — FYI
Jean Anleu was so fed up with corruption in his country that he decided to vent on the Internet, sending a 96-character message on the social-networking site Twitter.
That message has now earned him a potential five-year prison sentence and the unfortunate distinction of becoming one of the first people in the world to be arrested for a tweet.
Writing under his Internet alias “jeanfer,” Anleu urged depositors to pull their money from Guatemala’s rural development bank, whose management has been challenged in a political scandal: “First concrete action should be take cash out of Banrural and bankrupt the bank of the corrupt.”
Found by Aric Mackey.
Baldwin County – May 27, 2009:
A Foley physician said what appears to be the first case of HIV/AIDS cure in the world is getting little mention in the media.
Dr. Awadhesh K. Gupta, medical director at Foley Walk-In Med Care, said he first heard of the medical breakthrough in April when he attended the Annual Conference of the American College of Physicians in Internal Medicine in Philadelphia.
It’s a conference Gupta tries to attend every year.
“This is the most prestigious organization of physicians in Internal Medicine and is responsible for certifying post graduate training in Internal Medicine. It is also one of the oldest,” he said.
According to Gupta, who has been practicing medicine in the South Baldwin area since 1997, the cure was first reported in early 2008 by a group of physicians from Germany at the annual conference on “Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections” in Boston. The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, finally published the report in its Feb. 12, 2009, issue, Gupta said.
So why has the news of the first case of HIV/AIDS cure received so little attention where the public is concerned?
“I can’t be sure as to why so little publicity,” Gupta said recently.
“My guess is that most scientific researchers are somewhat stunned that a clinician — not a research scientist — has been able to come up with the cure. Most of the big research money and big name American institutions are somewhat embarrassed to acknowledge that the very first case of HIV cure is not coming from their institutions.”
The cure, instead, is coming from Charity University Hospital in Berlin, Germany, and the doctor is Gero Huetter, who works in the Department of Hematology, Oncology and Transfusion Medicine at the same hospital.
Asked about the reaction of attendees at the medical conference in Philadelphia as regarded the news of an HIV/AIDS cure, Gupta said, “Unfortunately, because of the hectic schedule, I did not try to engage too many physicians. However, the doctor presenting this information seemed extremely excited about it.”
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