The Local

A daycare teacher in Alingsås in western Sweden has been warned for giving cat food to the children. In connection with a project about cats two weeks ago the teacher gave children the cat food to taste. It is not the first time the teacher has encouraged the children to taste feline feed, reports local newspaper Alingsås Tidning.

One of the children’s parents complained to the rector, Cecilia Knutsson, who decided to take action and warn the teacher. “You have shown poor judgment in giving the children cat food,” wrote Knutsson in the teacher’s warning letter. Knutsson described the teacher’s actions as “unethical and inappropriate.” The teacher was given the chance to explain her actions and the pedagogic reasoning behind the tasting. She has apologized and promised that there will be no repeat.

Several parents expressed their support for the embattled teacher. “We have the utmost confidence in her and her otherwise sound pedagogic work,” wrote the parents in a plea to the disciplinary board on the teacher’s behalf. No child was forced to eat the cat food, and besides, the food poses no danger to humans, the cat-owning teacher wrote in her statement

She was warned? Are these people crazy?

This is something a friend emailed me. Perhaps it’s something that’s been around and around the Interwebitubes, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Hard to argue against.

Indian Chief, ‘Two Eagles,’ was asked by a white government official, “You have observed the white man for 90 years. You’ve seen his wars and his technological advances. You’ve seen his progress, and the damage he’s done.”

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, “Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?”

The Chief stared at the government official for over a minute and then calmly replied. “When white man find land, Indians running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water; women did all the work, medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night making love.”

Then the chief leaned back and smiled.

“Only white man dumb enough to think he can improve system like that.”

Thanks to Rustan Gandvik via Kevin Berg

The Daily Record

A GROUP of cannibals have been locked up after they ate a friend who offered to cook them dinner. Alexander Stepaniuk, 41, had invited four pals to his house for a meal. But the teacher ended up on the menu after the two men and two women beat him to death with a hammer.

The cannibals, who had been drinking vodka, cut Mr Stepaniuk’s body up before barbecuing the parts. They were arrested after worried neighbours in Chernovtsi, Ukraine, called police. Alexander Woytseshko, 34, Dmitri Chuba, 45, Lilia Kisilitsa, 23, and Svetlana Lupan, 26, admitted murder. The monsters told cops: “We had nothing against him personally – we just wanted to see what human meat tasted like.”

They were sentenced to between three years and life in prison.

I wonder, what kind of wine do you serve with Friend-o? Chianti?

We posted about this case, last week. The judge’s reversal is unprecedented – as was the massive, all-inclusive response to the original decision.

US District Court Judge Jeffrey White did a U-turn on his own earlier order in San Francisco on Friday, reversing suppression of the whistleblower website Wikileaks… The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion protesting the censorship of Wikileaks, and The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) assembled a media coalition that filed a friend of the court brief on Wikileaks’ behalf.

The media coalition comprised almost all of the major US newspaper publishers and press organisations, including — in addition to the RCFP — the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Associated Press, the Citizen Media Law Project, The E.W. Scripps Company, the Gannett Company, The Hearst Corporation, the Los Angeles Times, the National Newspaper Association, the Newspaper Association of America, The Radio-Television News Directors Association, and The Society of Professional Journalists…

Faced with such concerted and well founded opposition from the press, Judge White not only dissolved the injunction requiring Dynadot to suppress Wikileaks’ DNS entries but also denied the plaintiff’s request for an order prohibiting the website’s publication.

The article clearly defines the constitutional reasons for overturn. Well done, folks.

Victory by lawsuit, it’s the American way!

Star-Telegram.com – Feb. 28, 2008:

The Texas Democratic Party is warning that its March 4 caucuses could be delayed or disrupted after aides to White House hopeful Hillary Clinton raised the specter of an “imminent” lawsuit over its complicated delegate selection process, officials said Thursday night.
[…]
Another Democratic source who was privy to the often intense discussions confirmed that representatives of the New York senator’s campaign had issued veiled threats in a telephone call this week.

“Officials from Senator Clinton’s campaign at several times throughout the call raised the specter of ‘challenging the process,’ the official said.

So, what’s wrong with the process? It favors Obama!

the Democratic Party in President Bush’s home state has a complicated, hybrid primary-caucus that might just be better suited for Obama
[…]
The turnout formula has assigned more delegates to urban centers with a lot of young or black voters that tend to favor Obama and fewer delegates to poorer Hispanic areas expected to favor Clinton. Austin, which includes the University of Texas, gets eight; Houston gets seven and Dallas gets six.

Fluorescent tubes lit by high tension lines’ magnetic field

Thanks, joshua

A public relations aide to US President George W Bush has quit after admitting to plagiarising an academic in a newspaper column on education… After a review of his published columns since 2000, the Fort Wayne-based newspaper added on Friday that 20 had been “found to have portions copied from other sources without attribution…”

The Associated Press describes Timothy Goeglein’s role as “President Bush’s middleman with conservatives and Christian groups…”

The plagiarism was brought to light by a blogger, Nancy Nall, who posted a comparison of a Goeglein column with a Dartmouth College essay by Prof Jeffrey Hart on the goal of education.

You can’t tell the crooks in the White House apart without a scorecard.

Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, Researchers Find — It’s always something weird that changes everything.

The fact that bacteria could cause snow and rain was discovered almost by accident in the 1970s by study co-author David Sands, a Montana State University plant pathologist, during his research on Pseudomonas syringae, a microbe that causes ice to form on leaves.

Unable to discover the source of repeatedly infected fields, Sands exasperatedly took to the skies. He did the scientific equivalent of dragging a cup through the clouds — and lo and behold, there was P. syringae.

P. syringae is not the only biological ice nucleator, but it is the most common, and all varieties share a protein structure that provides a scaffold for free-floating water molecules. Once bound to the bacteria and to each other, the water vapors are able to freeze, and eventually fall back to Earth.

In a pure state, water vapors freeze at temperatures below -35 degrees Celsius. Nucleators allow this to happen in warmer conditions, and Christner’s study found that bacteria are the most common warm-temperature nucleators of all.

Researchers never realized bacteria could be so widespread in the clouds, said Christner, because the technologies used to measure fine dust — traditionally seen as the most important nucleator — ignore microbe-sized particles.

“It’s not that these atmospheric scientists are idiots — they’re not,” he said. “But biological nucleators were not previously recognized as being that abundant or important. They’re going to have to revise that.”

Click pics for lots more

It was a big underground submarine base and docks once in USSR. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Russian army left Ukraine it was partly abandoned and some of its parts was converted into a museum later.