Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday once again warned the United States and Israel against even contemplating a strike against the Islamic nation.

"They want to do it, but they know our power. They know that we would give them a very decisive response," he said in an exclusive interview with the Russia Today news channel.

"We would give them a crushing response," he continued. "We will defend ourselves with our full capability. But I hope that will never come. There is no reason for war, why should they attack us?"

On the issue of nuclear weapons Ahmadinejad said Iran would never seek to acquire a nuclear deterrent.

"We do not want nuclear weapons. We do not seek nuclear weapons. This is an inhuman weapon," he said, adding that "nuclear weapons are the weapons of the previous century."

A series of secret audio tapes made by Jacqueline Kennedy are to be made public in a TV special that will blow the lid off her private life with assassinated husband President John F Kennedy.

They were recorded with leading historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and have been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston until now.

Jackie O, as the world came to know her after she married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis five years later, ordered that the tapes should not be revealed until 50 years after her death. But although she died from cancer aged 64 in May 1994, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, has agreed to release them to US television network giant ABC.

A British girl, who suffers from the rare Kleine-Levin Syndrome, is said to nod off to sleep for two months at a time.

Lily Clarke, 21, a student, has slept through university exams, Christmas, New Year and even her own 18th birthday party after falling asleep a few days before.

Her mum Adele, 47, said the condition came on in 2007 after the family went for a meal following a day's ice-skating.

"Before the food arrived Lily had fallen asleep in her chair. We couldn't wake her and had to carry her from the restaurant," the Sun quoted her as saying.

"This is going to break your heart, but much of the music you heard in the '60s and early '70s wasn't recorded by the people you saw on the album covers. It was done by me and the musicians you see on these walls ... Many of these kids didn't have the chops and were little more than garage bands ... At concerts, people hear with their eyes. Teens cut groups slack in concert, but not when they bought their records."

Hal Blaine, longtime drummer for the Wrecking Crew, quoted in the Wall Street Journal on March 23, 2011

Before moving ahead with the John Phillips saga, I first need to pose an extremely important question to all my readers: is anyone out there in the market for a slightly used, covert film studio? If so, then all you need do is pull about $6.2 million out of your penny jar (though in today's housing market, you might be able to cut a better deal) and Lookout Mountain Laboratory can be yours! And if you act fast, you might be able to get a package deal on the lab and the Hodel house! (the photos in this post are of the lab as it looks today as a converted residential dwelling).

Another item worth noting: as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on January 28, 2011, "Ron Patterson, the flamboyant, free-spirited creator of the Renaissance and Dickens fairs, died Jan. 15 at a friend's house in Sausalito after an illness. He was 80." As staff writer Carolyn Jones noted, Patterson's creation "was sort of a medieval precursor to Burning Man." And Burning Man is, of course, a rather explicitly occult ritual first performed on the Summer Solstice of 1986 and now performed every summer in Nevada's Black Rock Desert before an audience of 50,000+.

What does any of that though have to do with Laurel Canyon? As we have seen so many times before, all roads on the Conspiracy Superhighway seem to lead to Laurel Canyon: "In the beginning, the Renaissance Faire was an experiment in Mr. Patterson's backyard. In the early 1960s, Mr. Patterson and his wife, Phyllis, who were both interested in theater and art, began hosting children's improvisational theater workshops at their Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles County) home."

One naturally wonders whether aspiring thespian and golden child Godo Paulekas (originally cast, it will be recalled, to play Satan in Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising) was involved in those workshops. In any event, there is certainly nothing creepy about children's workshops being hosted in a small, tight-knit community that was home to more than its fair share of pedophiles, so let's just move along.

Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz is disgusted by the political gridlock in Washington, D.C., and he's fighting back by calling for corporations and individuals to boycott all campaign donations.

In an email to employees (PDF), Schultz expressed his frustrations with Congress. The response was so great that 50 business leaders urged him to call for an all-out boycott of all campaign donations until politicians get their act together.

"The fundamental problem is that the lens through which Congress approaches issues is re-election," he told New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. "The lifeblood of their re-election campaigns is political contributions."

A former Pennsylvania judge who rendered guilty verdicts in exchange for over $1 million in kickbacks from a for-profit youth rehabilitation center will spend up to 28 years in prison, following his sentencing hearing last Thursday.

Over the weekend, CNN sat down with the mother of one of his victims, a young man who was so distraught by his unjust incarceration that he committed suicide.

"It's justice in the sense that he is going to pay for what we've been dealing with for the last eight years," Sandy Fonzo, the boy's mother, told the network. "True justice, I don't think there could ever be. He'll never live the sentence that I live."

This video is from CNN, broadcast Sunday, August 14, 2011.

Vandals killed 31 catfish at Woodland High School near Sacramento that were being raised as part of a Future Farmers of America project.

Several students had been working on a project raising channel catfish to show at the Yolo County Fair this week, the Woodland Record reported.

One student arrived at the campus Sunday morning and discovered all of the fish dead, either poisoned by a liquid herbicide or mutilated.

A Galveston man is under arrest following a bizarre incident in a woman's apartment over the weekend.

Lyle Bensley, 19, is accused of breaking into a woman's apartment in the 7800 block of Seawall Boulevard early Saturday morning. According to Galveston Police Captain Jeff Heyse, Bensley, who was wearing only boxers at the time, hissed and growled at the resident while biting her. The woman managed to get away and called 911.

Bensley was arrested a short time later and reportedly told police he was a vampire. He has been charged with burglary of a habitation, intending to commit a felony. Bond has been set at $40,000.

Captain Heyse said Bensley was referred to a deputy who handles mental health issues.

A Louisiana man has been arrested for decapitating his 7-year-old disabled son and leaving his head by the side of a road for his mother to see, cops said.

Jeremiah Lee Wright, 30, told police he did it because he was tired of taking care of the boy, who suffered from cerebral palsy and required a wheelchair and feeding tube, authorities told The Daily Comet newspaper.

The grisly slaying was discovered Sunday afternoon when a passing motorist spotted Jori Lirette's severed head lying by the side of a road in Thibodaux, La., the paper reported.

A few months ago, a friend in the entertainment industry told me of a new business model in Hollywood: hoarding videotapes. Apparently, the earthquake in Japan knocked offline a Sony factory that makes certain types of tape. That factory was also in the tsunami zone, so now there's a serious tape shortage threatening the television industry. The NBA scrambled to get enough tape to broadcast the NBA finals; one executive told the Hollywood Reporter, "It's like a bank run."

In the last few years, economists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about bank runs. A bank run happens when depositors think a bank is weak and scramble to get their money out before it collapses. "Tight coupling" of financial institutions, like when banks are overly dependent on each other, can create a cascading series of problems for the system itself. We saw this with Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt. Its AAA-rated debt instruments lost value unexpectedly; that caused money market funds that held those presumably safe bonds to suddenly lose value. A shadow bank run was the result, as investors rushed to withdraw from the money market funds.

Worryingly, there's been very little consideration of how systemic collapses can happen in another, perhaps more dangerous realm - the industrial supply system that keeps us in everything from medicine to food to cars to, yes, videotape. In 2004, for instance, England closed one single factory, which caused the United States to lose half of its flu vaccine supply.

Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation has been studying industrial supply shocks since 1999, when he noticed that global computer chip production was concentrated in Taiwan. After a severe earthquake in that country, the global computer industry nearly shut down, crashing the stocks of large computer makers. This level of concentration of the production of key components in a globalized economy is a new phenomenon. Lynn's work points to the highly dangerous side of globalization, the flip side of a hyper-efficient global supply chain. When one link in that chain is broken, there is no fallback.