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Passage of the bailout by Congress doesn’t look good.
Remember those movies where Mafia-types in prison payoff and intimidate to get caviar, fine whiskey and cigars while playing poker in recliners? Coming soon to a prison near you for all prisoners?
Police have been told to show more respect to their prisoners: dim the lights at night, don’t slam cell doors and serve tea, coffee or milk at least three times a day.
New “soft cell” human rights guidelines from Victoria’s Office of Police Integrity say cell blocks should be calm and relaxing, with light-shaded wall colours.
Meals should be of good nutritional value and quantity, and second helpings should be available “on reasonable request”.
The Police Association and a victims’ lobby group claimed yesterday the OPI’s standards for police cells treated prisoners better than many pensioners.
Association secretary Sen-Sgt Greg Davies said the reaction of police would be “fits of hysterical laughter followed by justified outrage”.
“No doubt we’ll have a queue of pensioners and victims of the financial crisis lined up to smash a window at a police station to be housed in such luxurious surroundings,” Sen-Sgt Davies said.
[…]
“I wonder when we’re going to see the introduction of mini-bars – that seems to be all that’s lacking,” he said.
Wonder if the financial meltdown will reduce our sky high incarceration rates. Too many in prison for personal drug use and other pointless reasons while the scumbag investment bankers not only don’t go to jail, they get money from the politicians that enable them. We pay either way.
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Today’s Guests:
- Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank, PCMagCast.com
- Cade Metz, U.S. Editor, The Register
- Vanessa Fox, Founder, NineByBlue
The Topics:
- Is the Google Search Model Broken?
- Intel Mulls Free Energy for Mobile Devices
- Wal-Mart To Start Selling iPhones
- British ISPs Censor Wikipedia
Here is the Ninth conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. What to do? This chat is not produced and is presented as-is for anyone who wants to listen in.
click ► to listen:
This week’s episode brought to you by:
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
- AOL intends to make hay with Bebo.
- FCC chairman criticized to an extreme.
- Study indicates that kids pass dirty pics of themselves routinely. “These kids!”
- Microsoft mammoth security update. Check it out.
- Netbooks said to be more popular than the iPhone. Sounds like a publicity stunt.
- More stories about the $99 iPhone.
- Apple bricking PCs running bootlegged OS-X.
- HP says the cloud is a crock.
- Jerry Yang apparently has no successor.
Right click here and select ‘Save Link As…’ to download the mp3 file.
A grandmother was left petrified when she was sent a police machine gun in the post by mistake.
The package was delivered by a courier to Catherine Roots when it should have been sent to firearms officers at the nearby police HQ. Mrs Roots had been expecting a horse harness in the post so opened the package thinking it was that. Instead, she found the Heckler & Koch black sub-machine gun staring back at her. She called the police and two armed officers turned up and took it away.
Red-faced officers later explained a gun supply company made a one-digit mistake with the postcode when they sent it to Dorset Police HQ in Winfrith near Dorchester. Mrs Roots, who is her 50s and runs a small-holding at Winfrith, said: ‘I was absolutely and totally shocked, and petrified. ‘I get a lot of packages and I signed for it thinking it was a harness for one of my horses. ‘I just plonked it down and didn’t think about it, but when I later opened it up I was terrified.
‘You don’t expect something like that to to arrive. I was petrified and I didn’t touch it – I didn’t know if it would go off. ‘I think something as a big and as serious as a sub machine gun shouldn’t be sent by a domestic courier that just travels around the roads and delivers to ordinary private addresses.’
Gives the term “going postal” a whole new meaning.
An actor almost died in front of the audience after slashing his throat in a bizarre on-stage mix-up.
Daniel Hoevels’ character was supposed to commit suicide in the drama with a blunt stage knife but had instead been provided with a real blade. He collapsed on stage with blood pouring from his neck and the audience started to applaud the spectacular special effects. It was only when Hoevels, 30, failed to get up to take a bow at Vienna’s Burgtheater in Austria that they realised something was wrong. Now police are investigating their own murder mystery drama – after refusing to rule out the possibility that the stunt may have been an attempt to bump off the actor by a jealous rival.
Police have been told that the knife had been bought at a local store and are asking if props staff forgot to blunt the blade for the performance of Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart, about Mary Queen of Scots. ‘The knife even still had the price tag on it,’ said one shocked police investigator.
The theatre’s props manager is understood to have been quizzed by police about the knife, reports Austrian daily Osterreich. The actor recovered after emergency treatment to his wound at a local hospital and appeared on stage the next night with a bandage around his neck.
‘If Hoevels had hit an artery or cut only slightly deeper, he would have died on stage,’ a doctor said.
Drama Queen.
Washington city officials say U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration will cause many logistical problems, including where to park 10,000 buses.
The thousands of chartered buses will pour into Washington for Obama’s Jan. 20 swearing-in ceremony, and the sheer size of the fleet — which will be carrying as many as 500,000 people — is posing a huge challenge for municipal officials.
Officials are estimating that 2 million to 4 million people will attend the inauguration and one of the questions is where to park the buses. With widespread street closures in downtown Washington, they won’t be able to drop off passengers at events, so officials have to find a central place for them to gather. But once that is determined, it will affect the city’s Metro system when the bus passengers try to squeeze on to public transit.
Washington City’s…call center staff has begun contacting hundreds of bus companies to ask about bookings and by the end of the week, they hope a statistical sampling will come up with a firm number of expected buses.
It’s gonna be worse than going to the shopping mall the day before Giftmas.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. – Billie Watts said she was tempted but couldn’t bring herself to keep $97,000 she said she found in a Cracker Barrel restroom. The 75-year-old Murfreesboro woman told The Daily News Journal that she discovered the money inside a tapestry bag hanging from a hook on a stall door last Thursday.
But five days later, the money and its anonymous owner remain something of a mystery in the community, where police said they have no report of the find. While digging through the bag to figure out its owner, Watts said she found a bundle of neatly stacked bills. Watts said she and her husband took the money home, but later called the restaurant back and asked if there was a lost-and-found department. She was told yes, and left her number.
A woman called about 15 minutes later and verified she was the owner by identifying pictures left in the bag. Watts returned the bag to the owner, whom she described as an elderly woman, but said she does not have the woman’s last name or phone number.
Watts said the woman told her that the money came from selling her home and her belongings and that she was going to start a new life in Florida with her son. Watts said the woman offered to pay her $1,000, but Watts refused it.
A manager of the Cracker Barrel restaurant, Bill Shupp, said no employees actually saw the money or the elderly owner.
If you found $97,000 in cash in a Cracker Barrel Bathroom, would you contact ‘Lost and Found?’ My guess is the lady who lost the money didn’t trust banks… go figure.
Jake Shimabukuro and his ukulele version of a Beatles classic
14-year old interviews John Lennon
A restaurant in China is using the image of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to promote its spicy chicken wings.
The Passion Barbecue Chicken Wings, in Shenyang, says its seasonings are a challenge for customers, just like Saddam was to the US and UK….
A restaurant spokeswoman told the Liao Shen Evening Post: “Saddam loved challenges, and eating our spicy chicken wings also requires courage, so it’s a good match.”
Okee-dokee.
Well… let’s just leave it at that and back away slowly.
Thanks, K B
Jobs is all about image and style and selling things at high cost which means high margins which means high profits. Bottom feeding isn’t. These speculations are all about Apple fanboy lust just like the Apple dropping DRM rumor. Not that Jobs wouldn’t sell a ton of each of these items if they were produced and rake in vast sums of iCash from ‘the rest of us.’ Hmmm… So maybe this debunking is part of Jobs’ plan. So maybe we WILL see these. I wonder when I can order them…
Apple fans love speculating about imaginary new products almost as much as they love getting their hands on a brand-new MacBook Air.
But it’s easy to get carried away and take these speculative flights of fancy as true, or even as somewhat credible rumors.
The latest of these rumors is the $100 Walmart iPhone, such a preposterous proposition that we thought we’d take a look at the rather obvious reasons why Apple won’t be stripping either the price or the capacity of its highly successful cellphone.
And while we’re at it, let’s debunk the Apple netbook and the Apple tablet, two other rumors that refuse to die.
On a vaguely related note: Psystar, the Apple cloner, may have interesting backers.
Times Online – December 8, 2008:
Gandhi would have welcomed the support given to the World Diabetes Foundation (WDF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) by Handicap International. That is the French charitable organisation that has been awarded a Nobel prize for its work with people left crippled and handicapped in Vietnam, Cambodia and other countries by landmines.
Exploding hidden landmines remain a considerable danger, but one that has been overtaken by diabetes as a reason for the amputation of younger people’s legs around the world. Diabetes now accounts for 70 per cent of all lower limb amputations. Hence the decision of Handicap International, while continuing to work in Vietnam, Cambodia and other former war zones, to add to its agenda the WDF campaign to reduce the incidence and improve the treatment of diabetes in developing countries.
Two men who crash-landed their plane in freezing waters survived 18 hours on a tiny sheet of ice “huddled together like penguins”.
The two – one Australian and the other Swedish – endured temperatures of -20C (-4F) after their Cessna plane ran into trouble over the far north of Canada.
Their survival equipment sank with the plane and rescue aircraft responding to their Mayday call failed to find them.
Australian Oliver Edwards-Neil, 25, and his Swedish flying partner Troels Hansen, 45, had been flying a Cessna Skymaster from the US to Sweden when both its engines failed over the Hudson Strait, just south of the Arctic Circle.
As the cockpit quickly filled with freezing water, they managed to scramble through a window and on to an ice sheet about 5m wide and 10m long before the plane sank, with all their equipment on board.
Mr Edwards-Neil said that their survival suits saved their lives. “But I never thought I could freeze that much. I was shivering non-stop,” he said.
They were found by a fishing boat that had heard their Mayday call and headed to the scene.
Mr Edwards-Neil and Mr Hansen were later transferred by helicopter to a hospital in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
The photo tells the whole tale. A couple of very fortunate guys.
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