A 73-year-old Florida man was fired from his job at Cracker Barrel earlier this week after he gave a corn muffin to a man who looked homeless.

Vietnam veteran Joe Koblenzer had worked as a greeter at Cracker Barrel for three years before he was fired for handing a man who "looked a little needy" the muffin.

The unidentified man came through the door and "asked [if] I had any mayonnaise and some tartar sauce," Koblenzer said. "He said he was going to cook a fish."

"I got it for him. As I walked out I put a corn muffin in" the same bag. Shortly thereafter, the restaurant's general manager called him into his office and said he was fired.

The restaurant released a statement claiming that the general manager fired him because he was a serial offender.

"During the time he was employed, he violated the Company's policies regarding consuming food without paying or giving away free food, on five separate occasions," the statement read. "Mr. Koblenzer received multiple counselings and written warnings reminding him about the company's polices and the consequences associated with violating them. On the fifth occasion, again per Company policy, Mr. Koblenzer was terminated."

A young couple in Pakistan were tied up and had their throats slit by the girl's parents after they married for love, police said on Saturday.

The 31-year old man and the 17-year old girl got married on June 18 in the Punjabi village of Satrah in eastern Pakistan's Punjabi district, without the consent of their families.

The girl's family was embarrassed by the marriage of their daughter, Muafia Hussein, to a man from a less important tribe, police said, according to Reuters.

The girl's mother and father then decided to lure the couple to their house late on Thursday evening with the promise that they would give the marriage a family blessing.

"When the couple reached there, they tied them with ropes. He [the girl's father] cut their throats," said local police official Rana Zashid.

The family has been arrested, but that is no guarantee that they will receive justice.

Pakistani law means that even if a woman's killer is convicted, her family is able to formally forgive the murderer. This means that families are able to nominate a family member to do the killing and then formally forgive them.

Facebook conducted a psychological experiment on its users by manipulating their emotions without their knowledge, a new study reveals.

Researchers toyed with the feelings of 689,003 randomly selected English-speaking Facebook users by changing the contents of their news feed, according to a paper published in the June edition of the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists' (PNAS).

During a week-long period in January 2012, researchers staged two parallel experiments, reducing the number of positive or negative updates in each user's news feed.

Though tech startups rely on origin myths and mantras like 'Fail fast, fail often,' the psychic toll of unrelenting failure simmers just beneath the exuberance

It is probably Silicon Valley's most striking mantra: "Fail fast, fail often." It is recited at technology conferences, pinned to company walls, bandied in conversation.

Failure is not only invoked but celebrated. Entrepreneurs give speeches detailing their misfires. Academics laud the virtue of making mistakes. FailCon, a conference about "embracing failure", launched in San Francisco in 2009 and is now an annual event, with technology hubs in Barcelona, Tokyo, Porto Alegre and elsewhere hosting their own versions.

While the rest of the world recoils at failure, in other words, technology's dynamic innovators enshrine it as a rite of passage en route to success.

But what about those tech entrepreneurs who lose - and keep on losing? What about those who start one company after another, refine pitches, tweak products, pivot strategies, reinvent themselves ... and never succeed? What about the angst masked behind upbeat facades?

Silicon Valley is increasingly asking such questions, even as the tech boom rewards some startups with billion-dollar valuations, sprinkling stardust on founders who talk of changing the world.

"It's frustrating if you're trying and trying and all you read about is how much money Airbnb and Uber are making," said Johnny Chin, 28, who endured three startup flops but is hopeful for his fourth attempt. "The way startups are portrayed, everything seems an overnight success, but that's a disconnect from reality. There can be a psychic toll."

It has never been easier or cheaper to launch a company in the hothouse of ambition, money and software that stretches from San Francisco to Cupertino, Mountain View, Menlo Park and San Jose.

In 2012 the number of seed investment deals in US tech reportedly more than tripled, to 1,700, from three years earlier. Investment bankers are quitting Wall Street for Silicon Valley, lured by hopes of a cooler and more creative way to get rich.

Most startups fail. However many entrepreneurs still overestimate the chances of success - and the cost of failure.

A power plant failure knocked out electricity across a big swath of Venezuela on Friday, darkening the lights at a nationally televised presidential ceremony and forcing a suspension of subway and train services around the country


The outage affected at least 14 of the South American country's 23 states and caused several hours of traffic snarls and darkened homes and offices in the capital, Caracas.

A power plant that supplies electricity to Venezuela's central and western regions failed in early afternoon, Electricity Minister Jesse Chacon said. Electricity was mostly restored in Caracas by nightfall, but remained out in other parts of the country, where power failures are more common.

A Chicago-area minister was arrested Thursday on charges of molesting a boy for six years, beginning when the boy was eight years old.

According to the Chicago Tribune, 57-year-old Rev. John Hays was taken into custody by Chicago police and charged with aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Hays is the director of congregations life of the First Presbyterian Church of River Forest.

Chicago Police Department spokesperson Officer Ana Pacheco said that Hays is accused of molesting the boy from February 2003 to February of 2009, beginning when the boy was eight. Hays' accuser, now 19, filed charges against the minister in May.

The victim was reportedly a friend of Hays' family and a congregant at his church. He told authorities that Hays repeatedly molested him in the minister's residence, which is located down the street from where the boy grew up.

A power plant failure knocked out electricity across a big swath of Venezuela on Friday, darkening the lights at a nationally televised presidential ceremony and forcing a suspension of subway and train services around the country. The outage affected at least 14 of the South American country's 23 states and caused several hours of traffic snarls and darkened homes and offices in the capital, Caracas.

A power outage hit a wide area of eastern Caracas and several cities in the interior of Venezuela for at least two hours Friday.

The outage started at 3:00 pm (07:00 pm GMT) and service began being restored about two hours later.

A Pennsylvania woman claims doctors took her seven-day-old healthy baby and called police and social workers simply because she gave birth at home. She also says that doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital transferred her baby to another hospital without her permission.

"[The doctor] came in the room with a stern look and said if you refuse to transfer her, we WILL CONTACT DHS (Department of Human Services) AND THE POLICE," said the woman, Fatima Doumbouya.

Doumbouya and her husband refused permission, but they didn't realize that the doctors had already decided to move their daughter to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The mother and her husband, Bilal Smith, only learned of the transfer when a nurse told them the baby was being moved. They had never given permission nor signed any paperwork authorizing the action. Doctors informed her that the baby would have to be transferred to Children's because St. Joseph's lacked the proper instruments to examine her.

US sanctions on Russia are putting a huge risk on American businesses and jobs, according to a recent article from Bloomberg. In fact, two top US business-related lobbies are getting ready to break with President Barack Obama over the idea of even more sanctions against Russia after several months of giving their disapproval to the White House.

On Thursday. June 26 the US Chamber of Commerce along with the National Association of Manufacturers are planning on running newspapers ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post - giving a stern warning that even more Russia sanctions risks ruining US workers jobs as well as businesses, claims an anonymous person who knows very well of these plans, cited by Bloomberg.

Leaders from both the US and European Union have made it clear to Russia that it risks a new set of sanctions on its economy sector unless that is it takes the necessary actions to de-escalate the crisis that has been on-going in Ukraine. Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel informed members of her party that sanctions created to affect Russia's $2 trillion economy have been put on the agenda for a meeting of EU leaders to be held June 26-27.

The defenders and promulgators of data-driven, predictive policing - which is meant to anticipate crimes before they happen - face a PR problem: reassuring the public against fears that such methods are ushering in a totalitarian future reminiscent of the science-fiction film Minority Report.

Concerns about preemptive crime fighting through data hoarding and analysis are hard to assuage, however, because they are perfectly valid.

A lengthy feature published in the Guardian on Wednesday looked at the permeation of data-driven analysis in the LAPD and other municipal police forces. "As the ability to collect, store and analyze data becomes cheaper and easier, law enforcement agencies all over the world are adopting techniques that harness the potential of technology to provide more and better information," it noted. "But while these new tools have been welcomed by law enforcement agencies, they're raising concerns about privacy, surveillance and how much power should be given over to computer algorithms."

The Guardian's report describes an LAPD war room full of video screens. They show incidents of crime in real time; multiple newscasts; the seismic effects of earthquakes; and sections of the city as small as 500 square feet where algorithmic data-crunching indicates that crimes are most likely to take place.

At first glance, such systems seem benignly empirical. Why wait for a robbery or a shooting when algorithms working beyond the capabilities of human intuition can help prevent these incidents in advance? But such an understanding wrongly assumes the neutrality of information. The picture of crime to come is based on pre-existing police data, which we know to be biased and flawed.