An Oklahoma company has designed a bullet-resistant blanket that's designed to protect children and teachers in the event of a school shooting.

The Bodyguard Blanket, made by ProTecht, is a bulletproof 5/16-inch pad that the company says is made from the same materials used by the U.S. military.

Steve Walker, a podiatrist who conceptualized the blanket, told The Oklahoman that the idea came to him after two tragedies: the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and the tornadoes in Oklahoma. He said the idea was to "stop that blunt-force trauma when that rubble is falling down on a child." The company estimates that the blanket can provide protection against 90% of all weapons that have been used in school shootings in the U.S.

Two Swedish women have been banned from owning animals after authorities found they had treated their cats as makeshift babies with one of them even 'breastfeeding' her pet.

Several anonymous reports prompted animal protection officers from Halland county council to visit the women's homes in the south-western Swedish region this autumn.

It emerged that the pair had pushed their two cats around in pushchairs. They had spoon-fed the cats while keeping them strapped to highchairs, and had also let the animals suck on pacifiers.

One woman also confessed she regularly let her cat suckle on her breast.

Authorities ruled that the pets had been mishandled and had been prevented from exercising natural animal behaviour, wrote Swedish public broadcaster SVT on Thursday.

It was further stated that the women were no longer allowed to own pets. The two cats were taken care of by animal protection officers following a visit to the women's homes.

Cats are among the most popular pets in Sweden, with the country's total feline population estimated to be more than a million.

We live in a world of short-term memories and long-term memory deficiencies. If the 24-hour news cycle was any indication, Americans appear to be bouncing from one catastrophic mass shooting to the next, with hardly any breathing room. Like this is just a regular occurrence America has learned to endure because... guns. It's the prevalence of firearms in the hands of the people, the anti-gunners say. Calls to limit, rewrite, redefine, or outright dispose of the 2nd Amendment are rampant.

But no one is looking at the data. If they did, they would realize something is really, really, really wrong here.

No, there haven't always been so many mass shootings. It hasn't always been this way. Mass shootings have skyrocketed in this country just in the last seven years under President Obama.

The following was compiled using the database over at Mother Jones on mass shootings in the U.S. from 1982—2015, up to and including the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on October 1st, 2015. It also includes the Wikipedia lists for mass shootings in the United States by year and postal killings in the U.S.

A new edition of Adolf Hitler's manifesto Mein Kampf, in which the Austrian-born dictator set out the anti-Semitic and racist ideology behind the Nazi regime, will be published in Germany for the first time since the end of World War II.

The Institute for Contemporary History (IFZ) in Munich announced on Tuesday that they will publish a two-volume, 2,000-page edition in January. Under German law, the book's copyright expires 70 years after Hitler's death—which is the day the Institute plans to present its new annotated version.

IFZ director Andreas Wirsching told AFP that the Institute is publishing the book as an academic work, completely removed from any of the uncritical versions that people can buy in second-hand bookshops. The six-year project, he said, aims to "shatter the myth" surrounding the book.

The institute plans to print up to 4,000 copies of the new version, complete with more than 3,500 academic notes, and have them on Germany's bookstore shelves by early January.

Written in 1923, before Hitler came to power, Mein Kampf was a bestseller in the Nazi era—with more than 12 million copies in circulation between 1933 and 1945—and was translated into 18 languages.

After the war ended in 1945, the Allies determined that the state of Bavaria should obtain the rights. Since then, authorities in the southern German state have refused to allow anyone to republish the book out of respect for victims of the Nazis and to prevent the incitement of hatred.

Until now there have been no new editions of the text, but existing copies have been sold and resold all over the world. In March, an anonymous buyer bought a two-volume set of Mein Kampf, signed by Hitler himself, for $43,750.

While historians welcome the book's publication, Jewish communities remain divided.

Scientists monitoring the spread of radiation in the ocean from the Fukushima nuclear accident report finding an increased number of sites off the US West Coast showing signs of contamination from Fukushima. This includes the highest detected level to date from a sample collected about 1,600 miles west of San Francisco. The level of radioactive cesium isotopes in the sample, 11 Becquerel's per cubic meter of seawater (about 264 gallons), is 50 percent higher than other samples collected along the West Coast so far, but is still more than 500 times lower than US government safety limits for drinking water, and well below limits of concern for direct exposure while swimming, boating, or other recreational activities.


Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and director of the WHOI Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity, was among the first to begin monitoring radiation in the Pacific, organizing a research expedition to the Northwest Pacific near Japan just three months after the accident that started in March 2011. Through a citizen science sampling effort, Our Radioactive Ocean, that he launched in 2014, as well as research funded by the National Science Foundation, Buesseler and his colleagues are using sophisticated sensors to look for minute levels of ocean-borne radioactivity from Fukushima. In 2015, they have added more than 110 new samples in the Pacific to the more than 135 previously collected and posted on the Our Radioactive Ocean web site.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg promises to give 99% of his Facebook shares to charity -- eventually.

Exact phrasing: the stock, currently worth $45 billion, will be donated "during [he and his wife's] lives." He's 31 and she's 30, so actuarial tables being what they are, by approximately the year 2065.

If Facebook or the Internet or the earth still exist.

Whoop de doo.

I would be far more impressed if Facebook would put some money into the American economy. How? By hiring more workers -- a lot more workers. Facebook's market cap is $300 billion -- almost 10 times more than GM. GM has 216,000 employees. I'm not sure Facebook could find work for 2 million workers -- but 12,000 is pathetic. They might start by hiring a few thousand 24-7 customer service reps so they could respond quickly when some antisocial pig posts your nude photo.

The part of the "ain't Zuck nice" philanthropist suck-uppery that really has me annoyed is the "charity" bit.

Disclosure: I'm on record as being not at all into charity. If something is important enough to require funding -- helping hurricane victims, sending doctors to war zones, poetry -- it ought to be paid for by society as a whole, out of our taxes. We shouldn't allow billionaires to aggregate enough wealth to billionaires in the first place. Partly, this is because it's unfair. No one can work hard enough to earn one billion dollars. Also because it gives too much control to individuals at the expense of the 99.99% of everyone else.

Unfortunately, we await the revolution. So we still have billionaires running around pretending to be nice (as opposed to where they belong, hanging from a lamppost).

Even by our current dismal standards, however, Zuck is full of crap.

Scientific evidence has emerged that questioning more is a sign of intelligence.

Researchers at Canada's University of Waterloo presented their new research paper "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullsh*t", which revealed that people who find statements like "rejuvenation is a constant, joy requires exploration" to be profound are less intelligent.

The creeping use of counter-terrorism policies in Britain to clamp down on civil liberties appears to be relying on a number of flawed assumptions. Not content with the stigmatizing of Muslim communities, the U.K.'s spot the terrorist approach also has the potential to criminalise political activists and campaigners by labelling them with impossible-to-define terms such as non-violent extremist or domestic extremist.

Prevent is one strand of Britain's counter-terrorism strategy which has had various mutations since the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, 2005. The most recent and controversial addition to the widely discredited strategy has been the statutory duty placed on every local authority, educational institution, and NHS Trust — plus the police and Prison Service — to report those suspected of being "drawn into terrorism."

The two suspects in the San Bernardino mass shooting that claimed 14 lives and wounded 17 people were a married couple. The man recently made a trip to Saudi Arabia, returning with his new wife, whom he met online.


As the police and FBI try to piece together events that led to Syed Farook, 28 and Tashfeen Malik, 27, murdering 14 people, shocked friends and colleagues have shared stories about Farook, a devout Muslim who never struck anyone as suspicious and was generally regarded as a kind man.

"Mr. Farook is a county employee. He works with his title as an environmental specialist in the Public Health Department. He has been employed there for five years," San Bernardino police chief Jarrod Burguan told reporters after the shootings.

"He never struck me as a fanatic, he never struck me as suspicious," Griselda Reisinger, a colleague who worked with Farook until May, told the LA Times. Another, Patrick Baccari, said that upon Farook's return from Saudi Arabia, the couple and their six-month-old daughter were practically "living the American dream."

Baccari shared a cubicle with Farook. He and Christian Nwadike, another colleague, said the tall and thin Farook never acted in an irregular manner. A devout Muslim, he rarely discussed religion at work. He also almost never started conversations with others.

The entire office recently held a baby shower for Farook, before he had taken paternity leave.

Many California communities take a law-enforcement approach to homelessness. But not Pacific Palisades.

On a sunny morning in the beachfront community of Pacific Palisades, Steven "Boston" Michaud perches confidently on a large dock tie just above the sand. He waves vaguely at the hills above the Pacific Coast Highway, indicating where he sleeps. "It's up there, but you'll never see me," he says, pointing to his own shadow on the ground, "because I'm a shadow and I don't bother anyone."

Mr. Michaud is one of about 170 homeless people in Pacific Palisades, an affluent waterfront neighborhood in Los Angeles. Pacific beaches have long been a magnet for the homeless from around the world.

Overall, California experienced the second-largest increase in the number of homeless people (1,786 individuals) among the 50 states this past year, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. As their ranks have swelled, some homeless people have edged out of the shadows and have taken up in tidier areas in the Golden State. That, in turn, has attracted the attention of residents - especially when crimes have occurred.