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South Carolina woman arrested for not returning movie she rented in 2005


Police State USA
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 12:53 UTC
Video Rental
© Gary Gardiner/Bloomberg News
Pickens - When a woman went to the police for help, she was unexpectedly arrested and charged with a crime: failure to return a movie she rented back in 2005.

Kayla M. Finley, 27, went to the Pickens County Sheriff's Office to report a crime on February 13th, but when she provided her name to the deputies, she was placed in handcuffs.

Nine years earlier, she had rented Monster In Law and apparently had not returned it to the video store. A warrant for her arrest had been issued in September 2005. Even though the rental store is no longer in business, police still intend on collecting that late fee - in the form of wringing her through the court system.

Her actual offense was "Failure to return rented video cassette," which is classified under petty larceny, a misdemeanor.

Police say that she was sent a warning letter from the store, but Finley says she never got this letter.

"Its obvious that Pickens County has nothing better to do. I fully intend on fighting this. Its ridiculous that I had this happen to me," Finley said to KPLCtv.com.
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Attention

Has the yoga community enabled predators?

Alice Williams
Daily Life, Australia
Thu, 06 Feb 2014 09:35 UTC
Yoga Predators_1
© Daily Life, Australia
The 'G' word has long become obsolete in the yoga world. We're much too smart to fall for 'gurus' and their connotations of sex cults, brainless devotees and robes so fugly they need a whole new colour wheel to describe. Besides, we don't need gurus when we now have 'super teachers', 'head of lineages', and 'founder of X-style yoga'.

The terms may have changed, yet the game remains very much the same. Match a charismatic teacher with eager and often vulnerable students, add a touch of human ego and just enough mysticism that students won't question any dodgy practices too closely. Wait a few years, then watch the whole thing end up in court cases and recriminations.

The latest 'don't call them gurus' to end up in hot water are Bikram Choudhury, head of Bikram yoga, and John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga, one of the fastest growing styles of yoga in the west. Last year five separate cases were filed against Bikram by former teachers, accusing him of rape, harassment, assault, discrimination and false imprisonment.

In the Anusara case, John Friend has been accused of mismanaging company finances, using tantric sexual practices to order to 'heal' a student with whom he was having a relationship, and misusing his power in creating a Wiccan coven (which he named 'Blazing Solar Flames') with three female employees. The coven's practices involved 'sexually charged rituals' which were meant to serve as a 'battery' powering up the Anusara enterprise. "It was certainly never the way that I had experienced Wicca," former coven member 'Melissa' told Daily Beast.
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Eye 1

Nigeria: Police shut down cannibal hotel restaurant 'with roasted human heads on the menu'

Christopher Hooton
The Independent
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 09:41 UTC
Image

Army caps and 'so many cell phones' were also seized
A tip-off led police to the macabre discovery in Anambra, Nigeria, with 11 people being arrested and AK-47 guns and other weapons being seized.

Human flesh was apparently being sold as an expensive treat at the restaurant, with authorities saying that roasted human head was even on the menu.

"I went to the hotel early this year, after eating, I was told that a lump of meat was being sold at N700, I was surprised," a pastor who had visited the eatery said.

"So I did not know it was human meat that I ate at such expensive price.

"What is this country turning into? Can you imagine people selling human flesh as meat," he added. "Seriously I'm beginning to fear people in this part of the world. "
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Arrow Down

Oklahoma senate endorses plan to abolish the electoral college

Josh Israel
Think Progress
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 12:28 UTC
red state blue state
© Dr_Flash/Shutterstock
The Oklahoma Senate voted Wednesday to pass a bill that would add Oklahoma to the growing list of states working to ensure that the presidential candidate receiving the most votes becomes president. It became the first legislative body in a GOP-leaning state to embrace the National Popular Vote, an interstate compact that would ensure that the candidate who garners the most votes in each presidential election would also receive a majority in the Electoral College.

Oklahoma is not a politically competitive states in presidential elections. No Democratic nominee has carried the Sooner State since President Lyndon Baines Johnson in his 1964 landslide victory - and Mitt Romney received more than twice as many votes as President Barack Obama in the 2012 race, carrying all 77 counties. As such, candidates on both sides of the aisle focus their travel and advertising budgets elsewhere, largely ignoring the state's 3.8 million residents.

SB 906, which passed 28 to 18 and now proceeds to the Oklahoma House, would add Oklahoma to a growing group of states that have agreed to automatically give their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, regardless of how the candidate does in their state. The compact, which has already been endorsed by ten jurisdictions possessing 136 electoral votes, would only go into effect when at least 270 electoral votes are governed by the compact. Oklahoma's 9 electoral votes would bring the count to 145, about 53.7 percent of the needed total.
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Heart - Black

The town that hanged an elephant


Daily Mail
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 05:13 UTC
Image

A photograph of the hanging of Mary the elephant
Trooping into the tatty Big Top to the accompaniment of a drunken four-piece band, the elephants in Charlie Sparks's travelling circus did their best to entertain the audience on that cold afternoon in February 1916.

They sat on their haunches, stood on their heads, and formed an elephantine train as they placed their forelegs on each other's backs and trumpeted around the ring.

In short, they performed every trick they had been tortured into learning, but they could not make up for the absence of the real star of the show, a five-ton Asian elephant named Mary.
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Pistol

LA Sheriff's Dept. shot and killed an 80-year-old man with a submachine gun in his own bed


Alternet
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 04:21 UTC
Image
© Shutterstock.com/nomeko
Mallory died when one of the officers, Sgt. John Bones, fired six shots from his MP-5 9mm submachine gun.
Sheriff's Department is facing a lawsuit over perhaps one of the most appalling acts of police brutality in recent years: Shooting an 80-year-old man to death with a submachine gun while he lay in his own bed.

According to Reason.com, last summer deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department burst into the home of retired engineer Eugene Mallory. The department suspected Mallory of having methamphetamine, after receiving an anonymous tip.

The sheriffs found no drugs inside the property. But they did find 80-year-old Eugene Mallory in his home, which is where people often are in the early hours of the morning. And here's where things took a deadly turn for the worst.

The deputies first claimed that they ran into Mallory in the hallway of his house, where he was carrying a gun. But after the investigators found that Mallory's bed was covered with blood, they changed their story.
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Eye 2

Alone, jobless and mentally ill: Australian dad's road to murder

John Silvester
The Age Victoria
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 03:55 UTC
Image
© Ken Irwin
Grief-stricken locals have left flowers, balloons and teddy bears at the Tyabb recreation reserve where Luke Batty died.
As Greg Anderson left the Frankston accommodation house where he had been staying, he told fellow residents he would not be coming back.

Later a large knife was found missing from the house.

It is believed the 54-year-old concealed the knife and other personal items in a bag he took with him on Wednesday, catching public transport and walking to Tyabb's recreation reserve.

It was there the mentally ill Anderson killed his son Luke Batty before being fatally shot by police.
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Cupcake Pink

Shocking! National Science Foundation poll finds 1 in 4 Americans unaware that Earth circles Sun


Breitbart
Fri, 14 Feb 2014 14:38 UTC
Image
Americans are enthusiastic about the promise of science but lack basic knowledge of it, with one in four unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun, said a poll out Friday.

The survey included more than 2,200 people in the United States and was conducted by the National Science Foundation.

Ten questions about physical and biological science were on the quiz, and the average score -- 6.5 correct -- was barely a passing grade.

Just 74 percent of respondents knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun, according to the results released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Fewer than half (48 percent) knew that human beings evolved from earlier species of animals.
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Bizarro Earth

The 14,000 oil spills in America that nobody is talking about

Abby Martin
Youtube.com
Thu, 13 Feb 2014 00:00 UTC
Abby Martin goes over updates to the chemical spill in West Virginia and the coal-ash spill in North Carolina, exposing the human and environmental impact as well as the lack of accountability that accompanies tens of thousands of similar ecological catastrophes that occur in the US every year due to the US' addiction to fossil fuel.


Comment: Oil spills are devastating to the environment and also toxic for humans:
What Sickens People in Oil Spills, and How Badly, Is Anybody's Guess
The Consequences of 'Drill, Baby Drill': More Than 90 Oil Spills a Day in the U.S.
U.S. railroad oil spills in 2013 surpassed previous four decades combined
Polluted America

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Heart - Black

Second grader left to walk streets for hours after teacher locks her out of class for spilled water


Mail Online
Wed, 12 Feb 2014 12:59 UTC
Image

Demanding answers: Damia and Jason Dillard's seven-year-old daughter Samaya was found wandering the streets on December 13 after being kicked out of class for spilling water
  • Jefferson Elementary School teacher Lupe Rodriguez accused of dragging Samaya Dillard, 7, out of class on her chair on December 18
  • The second grade student then walked about two miles away from the Californian school, across a busy highway and to a parking lot
  • She was missing for more than an hour before anyone noticed
  • Her dad Jason Dillard found her roaming the neighborhood
  • Samaya's parents are suing the school, claiming the teacher had bullied the girl over several months
The parents of a seven-year-old girl who wandered the streets for up to two hours after her 'bully' teacher kicked her out of class for spilling water are suing the school.

Jason and Damia Dillard say the Jefferson Elementary School teacher dragged their daughter, Samaya, out of the second-grade class on a chair 'in a fit of frightening rage' about 9.30am and ordered her to stay outside on December 18.

But after sitting alone through recess and the beginning of her reading class, Samaya walked out of the California school and across major intersections, a freeway and through a shopping center parking lot before she was found.

She'd been missing for more than one hour before anyone noticed she was gone.
      Read More...
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