Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies’ products.

Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.

The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.

“We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them,” said Diana Farsetta, one of the group’s researchers…

"Whenever you were with Paul, there was never a dull moment," his wife said. "He was awesome."

A native of Miami, Gleason was an avid athlete. Before becoming an actor, he played Triple-A minor league baseball for a handful of clubs in the late 1950s.

Gleason honed his acting skills with his mentor Lee Strasberg, whom he studied with at the Actors Studio beginning in the mid-1960s, family members said.

Through his career, Gleason appeared in over 60 movies that included "Die Hard," "Johnny Be Good," and "National Lampoon's Van Wilder." Most recently, Gleason made a handful of television appearances in hit shows such as "Friends" and "Seinfeld."

Gleason's passions went beyond acting. He had recently published a book of poetry.

"He was an athlete, an actor and a poet," said his daughter, Shannon Gleason-Grossman. "He gave me and my sister a love that is beyond description that will be with us and keep us strong for the rest of our lives."

Actor Jimmy Hawkins, a friend of Gleason's since the 1960s, said he remembered Gleason for a sharp sense of humor.

"He just always had great stories to tell," Hawkins said.

A dragon-like dinosaur unearthed in South Dakota has been named "Dracorex hogwartsia" (Dragon King of Hogwarts) with the help of a group of kids at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. The name has received the blessing of JK Rowling, who says it will give her more cred with her "science-loving family."

discovery.com says:
The newly described horny-headed dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia lived about 66 million years ago in South Dakota, just a million years short of the extinction of all dinosaurs. But its flat, almost storybook-style dragon head has overturned everything paleontologists thought they knew about the dome-head dinos called pachycephalosaurs.

[...]

Superman stands between humanity and a capricious universe.
(read the entire article)

[...]

Buffy came right after that. They said, "Do you want to do a show?" And I thought, "High school as a horror movie." And it really was. And so the metaphor that I had begun to strike at in Alien: Resurrection became the central concept behind Buffy, and that's how I sold it, and that’s what they bought, and they got it, and they let me do it — and after that, everything was about it.

And then we came to Firefly, and Serenity, where I took away the metaphorical aspect — but science-fiction always opens you up to every element of history that you want, because the future is just the past in a blender. And so rather than a straight-on metaphor, it was more an idea of, "I can take anything from the human experience that I've read about or felt or seen — like, what is it like after a war? And it doesn’t matter which war or which country — what is it like for the people who lost?"

It's always about people. The idea behind the show was to take nine people and say, "Nine people look out into the blackness of space and see nine different things." That is the show. With the movie, obviously, you can't just say something that vague; I had to make the movie more specific. It's about freedom and about how much you can take, and how much you can control people, even for their own good, before you lose them.

Visitors to Amora - The Academy of Sex and Relationships at the Trocadero in Piccadilly, will pass through seven zones including Pleasure and Orgasm.

The 10,500sq-ft exhibit is designed to "separate fact from myth and educate everyone into being better lovers".

You have to be aged 18 and over to get in and tickets will cost £15 for the attraction which opens on 7 September.

Next comes self-medicating with drugs or alcohol. Divorce, crime, homelessness and suicide might follow. Heading off these tragedies takes early intervention in the forms of job and stress counseling and education, Dozier says.

But the agency whose job it is to care for the nation�s 26 million vets is under-funded and ill-equipped to address the problem, critics say. The VA, which spends more than $70 billion annually (half of it for medical care), has suffered budget shortfalls for years. Last year it came up $3 billion short.

Exploding enrollment and skyrocketing medical costs are partly to blame. �[The] VA has experienced unprecedented growth in the medical system workload over the past few years,� reads a Department statement. �The number of patients treated increased by 22 percent from 4.1 million in 2001 to more than 5.3 million in 2005.�

�This Administration still does not count caring for veterans as part of the cost of war,� contends Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), ranking member of the Senate Veterans� Affairs Committee. �[The] VA wildly underestimated the number of younger vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the old days, building an international telecom infrastructure and growing its market share required a colossal pool of capital. Today, Foneros do both of those jobs themselves. Sure, the company has $22 million to burn, which is nothing to sneeze at. But it also has an advisory board full of A-list bloggers like Dan Gillmor and David Weinberger, a powerful engine propelling the network to critical mass.

Bloggers are sometimes pigeon-holed as pundits or journalists. In the Web 2.0 economy, they can be kingmakers, channeling crowds of willing participants wherever- they like.

Tew was being extorted - an experience that is becoming more and more common in cyberspace. A rash of such attacks against gambling sites first swept the Net in 2004. Now, according to a survey by InformationWeek and Carnegie Mellon University, 17 percent of small and midsize businesses report being targeted. But Tew cockily shrugged off the extortionists. He wasn't some broke kid from the sticks anymore; he was a self-made millionaire man.

The Dark Group called his bluff. “Hello u website is under us attack," they emailed, with a demand for $50,000. "if u pay we do not ddos u site even again! and u hava a nice life :)" Given his promise to advertisers, an outage could get him sued. That's when Tew's entrepreneurial instinct kicked in. He struck a deal with a Web security company, which agreed to protect his site in exchange for a plug in Tew’s blog. The page went live again. The FBI started an investigation.

"Perhaps the attackers have inadvertently done me a favour!" Tew later blogged. Word of the hit had increased his site's traffic, proving one of the great axioms of business: There's no such thing as bad PR. The pixelpreneur is now doing speaking engagements, writing an ebook, and developing a TV show about his experience.

[...]

I asked Richie if he knows just how big he is here. He said, "The answer is, I'm huge, huge in the Arab world. The answer as to why is, I don't have the slightest idea."

He has performed in Morocco, Dubai, Qatar and Libya. There is obviously something up there. The more we talked, the more he theorized as to the reasons his music might be so popular here. He thinks it is because of the simple message in his music: Love.

Richie says he was told Iraqis were playing "All Night Long," on the streets the night U.S. tanks rolled into the country in 2003.

The information involved mainly those veterans who served and have been discharged since 1975, said VA Secretary Jim Nicholson. Data of veterans discharged before 1975 who submitted claims to the agency may have been included.

Nicholson said there was no evidence the thieves had used the data for identity theft, and an investigation was continuing.

[...]

Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, who is a Vietnam veteran, said he would introduce legislation to require the VA to provide credit reports to the veterans affected by the theft.

"This is no way to treat those who have worn the uniform of our country," Kerry said. "Someone needs to be fired."

The VA said it was notifying members of Congress and the individual veterans about the burglary. It has set up a call center at 1-800-FED-INFO and website for veterans who believe their information has been misused.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicts there will be 13-16 named storms, four of which will be "major storms".

But it says 2006 will be less active than last year's record-breaking season which saw Hurricane Katrina cause widespread devastation.

The US hurricane season starts on 1 June and lasts until 30 November.

"Noaa is predicting an above normal hurricane season, with 13-16 named storms, of which eight to 10 are predicted to become hurricanes," the agency's administrator, Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, said on Monday.

The poster for 'The Road to Guantanamo' depicts a detainee hanging by his handcuffed wrists with a burlap bag over his head and blindfold over the bag, The Washington Post reported.

The documentary tells the story of three British men who were held at Guantanamo for more than two years before being released without ever being charged.

The poster was rejected one day after it was submitted to the MPAA, which attaches ratings to U.S. films.

A spokesman for the film's distributor, Roadside Attractions, said the MPAA said the image was not appropriate for the eyes of children.

A new poster, which got MPAA approval, shows only a pair of shackled hands and arms.

The film is due to open in U.S. theaters June 23.

So says Ian Crawford, a researcher from University of London’s Birkbeck College in the UK. He told a SETI specialist meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in London last week that although he considers such a find a long-shot, it is definitely worth bearing in mind.

“This is not a primary reason to go back to the Moon – there are very strong scientific reasons for going back. But if we go back to the Moon in the next 20 or 30 years, then amongst those things we might like to keep our eyes open for are alien artefacts,” Crawford told New Scientist.

The biologically-inspired Madeleine robot, announced this month in the debut issue of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, is an autonomous vehicle with four flippers designed to pitch up and down.

By experimenting with different combinations of flipper motion, biologist John Long of Vassar College and his team compared the efficiency two-flippered and four-flippered motion.

"What Madeleine has shown is that there are distinct differences and advantages to using just two. This has relevance to looking at the evolution of mammals themselves," said Frank Fish, professor of biology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. Fish, an expert in the biomechanics of swimming animals, is not associated with the research.

[...]

(Alternate) Time Systems -- Doomsday -- Miscellaneous -- National Debt

Counters/Trackers -- Clock, Counter, Countdown Code -- Meta Clock Pages -- Year 2000
(Those listed immediately above are merely section titles.)

The tuna fish, which had provoked intense interest from Muslims, had apparently been stolen by people posing as National Museum officials.

The fish was found at the shop where it had first come to public attention.

The fish was being studied to find out if the Arabic inscription "You are the best provider" was natural or a hoax.

Sceptics say the writing was the work of someone who caught the fish and then threw it back into the sea.

But others say this would be impossible, and local imams are said to have been talking in the mosques about the fish.

[...]

The text is close to the Koranic verse: "Wa anta khair al-raziqin"

The move is part of a deal on restoring Hemingway's legacy that, correspondents say, has united the usually feuding governments of Havana and Washington.

The papers sent to the US Library of Congress include copies of Hemingway's letters and some of his famous novels.

Hemingway spent much of his time living in Cuba between 1939 and 1960.

[...]

The documents sent include copies of letters in which Hemingway outlines his stance on World War Two and the Spanish Civil War.

Broadcasting from the Cannes Film Festival, Lauer addressed the cast:

"People wanted this to say 'Fiction fiction fiction!' How would you have all felt if there was a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie? Would it have been okay with you?"

"I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer at the front saying 'This is fiction.'" McKellen responded. "I mean walking on water? I mean, it takes an act of faith."

McKellan went on to say he found the Bible "somewhat preachy" and called the ending "a bit of a downer."

There, the retired aircraft carrier will begin a new tour of duty as the world's largest intentionally created reef.

Navy divers detonated 500 pounds of explosives aboard the rusting ship yesterday to send it on a 212-foot plunge.

Years ago, the earth passed through a cloud of space dust, causing the dead to rise with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Terror spread across the land, until a collar was invented that made the zombies docile, even useful. A company was born: ZomCon. Thanks to their patented domestication collar, zombies became gardeners, milkmen, servants, even pets. ZomCon would like everyone to believe that they have the world under control - but do they?

Timmy Robinson doesn't think so. He thinks the world is "phony-baloney". An awkward loner, Timmy spends so much time in his room even his own parents don't notice him. So when Mom buys a zombie to help around the house, Timmy is surprised, and even curious, when the beast wants to play catch. When the zombie saves him from the local bullies, a true friendship is born, and Timmy names the zombie, "Fido".

But Fido's collar goes on the fritz, and the neighbors start paying the ultimate price. To complicate matters, ZomCon's notorious zombie-control specialist, Mr. Bottoms, has moved in across the street.

What begins as a small town story about a boy and his best friend, becomes a biting satire about our world, the price of fear, and the rewards of risking love. "Fido" will rip your heart out.

The site, thought to be an observatory or place of worship, pre-dates European colonisation and is said to suggest a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy.

Its appearance is being compared to the English site of Stonehenge.

It was traditionally thought that before European colonisation, the Amazon had no advanced societies.

Plot outline: Set against the violent underworld of black-market book publishing and a society that despises all things literary, a rookie author strives to bring her prose to the masses by going back to her online roots.

A heist film and adventure epic, it would have married the sprawling canvas of films like "The Great Escape" and "Papillon" with the chase-scene histrionics of "Bullitt" (transferred to motorcycles, McQueen's lifelong passion) along with some ancient history and visionary science thrown in for good measure.

[...]

What he found when he got the trunks to his office floored him: 1,700 pages of hand-typed material, written by Steve McQueen over a two-year period from 1969 to 1970. It amounted to a proto-PowerPoint presentation for a finished film, in which an archaeologist from the Museum of London enlists a renegade Navy diver, who works for the oil companies and races motorcycles on the "shores of the Mojave," in a plan to explore the cenotes, caves in the Yucatan jungle that reveal underground lakes. Here, a millennium before, Mayan priests sacrificed virgins covered in gold and precious jewels, a fortune rumored to still adorn their skeletons at the bottom of these sacred wells.

The writing is filled with a reverence for nature and sympathy to the class struggle in Mexico, and there is a motorcycle chase spelled out in illustrated storyboards that McQueen planned as the most elaborate ever committed to film. In William F. Nolan's biography "McQueen," the actor describes the film as follows: "Our story will center on a guy who takes his cycle into the Mexican wilds on a personal treasure hunt. Naturally, I'll play the guy on the cycle."

Here's how McQueen closes his final meditation on "Yucatan":

He was parting the curtains on tomorrow
A commando on the liquid frontier...
The inheritors of that emerald planet
That jewel on the finger of the firmament
Ringed by its creator with sapphire seas
For the exaltation and the ultimate salvation of the Dominion of Man.

A capacity to give GPS locations, an ability to translate Arabic signs and text into English, as well as on-command video recording also are being demonstrated in Aberdeen. Sensor system software is expected to extract keywords and create an indexed multimedia representation of information collected by different soldiers. For comparison purposes, the soldiers wearing the sensors will make an after-action report based on memory and then supplement that after-action report with information learned from the sensor data.

Starting Monday, Vivid Entertainment says it will sell its adult films through the online movie service CinemaNow, allowing buyers to burn DVDs that will play on any screen, not just a computer.

It's another first for adult film companies that pioneered the home video market and rushed to the Internet when Hollywood studios still saw it as a threat.

"Leave it to the porn industry once again to take the lead on this stuff," said Michael Greeson, founder of The Diffusion Group, a consumer electronics think tank in Plano, Texas.

"The rest of Hollywood stands back and watches and lets the pornography industry work out all the bugs," he said.

The following glossary will help you decipher the most commonly used acronyms and emoticons.

Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food.

"We just want them to go away," said Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association. "This little company could cause major problems."

Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines.

Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries.

But farmers, environmentalists and others fear that such medicinal crops will mix with conventional crops, making them unsafe to eat.

The plot of King Dork involves a scrawny 10th grader trying to realize his rock 'n' roll dreams (and solve a murder mystery), but that's all you need to know. Skip the press and just read the dang thing. And for all of you doubters who don't believe you could appreciate something from the bookstore's "young adult" section, I suggest you bring those Harry Potter books out of hiding and get over it.

Here's the first chapter to get you started.

[...]

The study, recently published in the journal Methods, also found that booze affects monkeys much the same way it affects people.

"It was not unusual to see some of the monkeys stumble and fall, sway, and vomit," Chen added. "In a few of our heavy drinkers, they would drink until they fell asleep."

Yeah. That's a character that Mark Waid invented that was really just put to me like come up with the most God awful, Rob Liefeld sort of design that you can. What I was stealing from was - really only two key designs of Rob's - the design of Cable. I hated it. I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character - the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what's with all the guns? But the thing is, when I put those elements together with the helmet of Shatterstar -- I think that was his name -- well, the ram horns and the gold, suddenly it held together as one of the designs that I felt happiest with in the entire series.

Really?

Yeah. I don't think it ended up looking like a buffoonish character. In a way, that gold rams head affect took it to a new level of almost biblical metaphor that had a nice little touch to it. It's the kind of thing I should have been striving, but it was much more accidental.

It's interesting you used the words "biblical metaphor," as "Kingdom Come" is rife with Christian symbolism. Then of course today, 10 years later, Christian religions have a louder, more pronounced and influential voice than it had 10 years ago. Once again, the book proves prophetic.

Today, there's a lot more direct discussion of things regarding images and beliefs and faith and all that kind of stuff, whereas back then it really wasn't a hot topic of conversation. It was just a part of every day culture. Now we can find these types of images and debate all over our country today.

[...]

Allright, keeping all that in mind and the fact that "Kingdom Come" has helped inspire a new generation of comics creators, how would you do the book differently today? Or would you do it any differently?

Well, it's weird, because right now I could argue that the book is being done today, not so much in what I see DC doing, but with what I see Marvel doing in "Civil War." Really, "Kingdom Come" was meant to be a civil war between two different armies of super humans, particularly super heroes. You know, one team was mostly Batman, the other team mostly Superman. The story evolved in a very different way from that original intention of mine, but when I see what they're doing with Captain America and Iron Man and "which side" and the whole idea that there's this one, nuclear, devastating moment that sets off this whirl wind of change where the heroes have to put their own house in order, that's basically the set-up of "Kingdom Come."

It's actually fun for me to watch it being done again in this way because they're going to be able to give it a lot more time to expand, whereas the kind of work that Mark Waid and I did together was very compressed. There was only so much depth we could give any one of those particular concepts because it's a four-issue series that's only about 200 pages. That may sound like a lot, but for actual content there are so many more stories that could be spun out of there.

Crater Galle contains parallel gullies on its southern rim, a possible sign of liquid water running on Mars' surface.

Its interior has also been shaped by the action of wind and shows signs of "dust devil" tracks, which have removed the bright surface coating of dust.

A US space agency (Nasa) orbiter has also sent back its first colour image after arriving at Mars on 11 March.

The "face" in the European images was first pointed out in photos taken during Nasa's Viking Orbiter 1 mission.

The kid's eyes are locked on the screen. He's got this look in his eyes is like he really believes that his brain must be malfunctioning. Like he just can’t comprehend what he's watching. Like as if he didn't even know she was a porn star. His jaw drops.
After about 30 seconds of this kid standing in front of the screen, frozen in the hypnotic spell of ass, mouth, ass, mouth, ass, mouth… he turns to her asks her a question, and I hear her say, "I was gonna tell you."

NO FUCKING WAY.

- It contains NO phosphors
- It is NOT radio active
- It DOES NOT contain EverGlow
- It does NOT cause cancer
- It has FDA approval as a Spectral Marking [tattoo] Pigment that was developed for use in tracking [tattooing] animals and fish - and yes the same ones we eat, and has been tested and used with NO adverse reaction in humans for over 10 years.
- the florescent dye is completely safe and has NO carcinogen and is human safe and does not spread or "blow out" because the dye is contained and it never even touches the skin because of

There she was taken in by a local domestic violence shelter, but every day she would go to the town center and hide behind a tree to see who was getting off buses bringing evacuees to the town. She and others like her feared their abusers might end up in the same place.

To keep abusers from finding them, victims of domestic violence often go to elaborate lengths to keep even the most basic contact information out of databases associated with voting records, supermarket club cards and change-of-address forms.

Those fleeing Katrina, however, faced a more pressing conundrum due to mandatory forms at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Red Cross centers.

"Domestic violence victims really had to choose: 'Do I receive FEMA and Red Cross assistance and get the cash I desperately need, or do I make sure I stay hidden in a shelter and keep my family safe?'" said Southworth.

Southworth attributes the lack of anonymous assistance from federal and state government agencies to overblown worries that "everyone is out to get two free turkeys instead of one."

[you can hear this on the main news site]

They hope that the music, when played on medieval instruments in situ, will resonate throughout the chapel unlocking a secret in the stone.

The breakthrough to interpreting the notation came when Mitchell's father discovered that the markings carved on the face of the cubes seem to match a phenomenon called Cymatics or Chladni patterns. Chladni patterns form when a sustained note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal covered in powder producing marks. The frequency used dictates the shape of the pattern, for example; the musical note A below middle C vibrates at 440 KHz and produces a shape that looks like a rhombus. Different notes can produce various shapes including flowers, diamonds and hexagons - shapes all present on the Rosslyn cubes. Stuart Mitchell believes this is "beyond coincidence" and has assigned a note to each cube.

Ernst Chladni first documented the phenomenon in the late 18th century - yet it appears to be present in a 15th century building. Which begs the question: "Was Sir William St Clair (the man who built Rosslyn Chapel) familiar with sciences far in advance of his time?".

Stuart Mitchell believes a link between the Knights Templar – who may have gleaned advanced Eastern scientific knowledge during their stay in Jerusalem during the Crusades – and Rosslyn could explain the encoded musical notes.

"The symbolism in Rosslyn is reaching back to times of a civilisation that is lost to us now that had sciences that are the roots of all the mechanics of the universe," says Mitchell.

If this science was used in the carvings at Rosslyn, then there needs to be an explanation of how this information came to be lost for centuries. According to Mitchell, the Church suppressed the knowledge as a means of controlling the public. "What it points towards is the church system denying people certain knowledge because knowledge is awareness. People who knew too much were burnt as witches."

What Mr. Smith did not anticipate, he said, was that Mr. Colbert's nearly 20-minute address would become one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere. Mr. Colbert delivered his remarks in character as the Bill O'Reillyesque commentator he plays on "The Colbert Report," although this time his principal foil, President Bush, was just a few feet away.

[...]

At issue was a heavily nuanced, often ironic performance by Mr. Colbert, who got in many licks at the president — on the invasion of Iraq, on the administration's penchant for secrecy, on domestic eavesdropping — with lines that sounded supportive of Mr. Bush but were quickly revealed to be anything but. And all this after Mr. Colbert tried, at the outset, to soften up the president by mocking his intelligence, saying that he and Mr. Bush were "not so different," by which he meant, he explained, "we're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol."

"Now I know there's some polls out there saying this man has a 32-percent approval rating," Mr. Colbert said a few moments later. "But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking 'in reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

That line got a relatively warm laugh, but many others were met with near silence. In one such instance, he criticized reporters for likening Mr. Bush's recent staff changes to "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." "This administration is not sinking," Mr. Colbert said; "this administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg."