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Syria arrests more than 1,000: activist


CBC News
Tue, 03 May 2011 04:39 UTC
Image
© Bilal Hussein/Associated Press
A Syrian Kurdish protester shows his palms as he shouts anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad slogans during a sit-in in front of the UN house in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, on Monday.

Syrian authorities have arrested more than 1,000 people and many more have been reported missing in the latest sweep aimed at crushing the uprising against President Bashar Assad, a human rights group said Tuesday.

Ammar Qurabi, who heads the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, said the 1,000 detentions were made since Saturday in house-to-house raids across the country.

"They are picking up people in an arbitrary manner," Qurabi told The Associated Press. In the southern city of Daraa, the epicenter of the protest movement, agents have been arresting men under 40, he said.

Assad is determined to crush the six-week-old revolt, which is the gravest challenge to his family's 40-year-old ruling dynasty.

Assad inherited power from his father in 2000, and has maintained close ties with Iran and Islamic militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
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Heart - Black

US: California dog killed by swarm of bees in home's backyard when family at Sunday church


The Associated Press
Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00 UTC
A Southern California family returning home after church found their 6-year-old dog covered with bee stings and convulsing in the backyard.

The 40-pound (18-kilogram) Jindo named Inu died minutes later near the hive under an eave of the family's Torrance home.

Joe Park tells the Torrance Daily Breeze that he and his family left for church on Sunday and the dog was happily playing in the backyard. When they returned hours later, she was lying in the yard, covered with hundreds of bee stingers.

A family friend frantically tried to remove the stingers, but the dog died minutes later.

Hive removal expert Don Sorensen says there may have been 25,000 bees in the hive. It's not known if they were aggressive Africanized killer bees.

Source: The Canadian Press
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Bizarro Earth

Canada: Alberta Oil Pipeline Leaked 28,000 Barrels


CBC News
Tue, 03 May 2011 06:50 UTC
Image
© Google Maps
The leak occurred about 100 kilometers northeast of Peace River, Alberta.
Emergency crews working to clean up massive leak northeast of Peace River

A pipeline break northeast of Peace River, Alta., has leaked 28,000 barrels of crude oil, during what is now considered to be one of the largest spills in the province's history.

The leak from the Plains Midstream Canada pipeline, discovered Friday, was originally thought to have involved several hundred barrels of oil.

It now appears to be the biggest crude oil pipeline leak in Alberta since 1975, when a Bow River Ltd. pipeline leaked 40,000 barrels, according to Davis Sheremata, a spokesman for the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board.

"It's been the biggest spill from a pipeline involving crude oil that we've had in Alberta certainly in about the last 18 years or so," Sheremata said.

The last major incident was in 1993 when 18,000 barrels of crude oil leaked from a BP Canada pipeline.
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USA

Obama advisor: Waterboarding didn't lead to bin Laden kill

David Edwards
Raw Story
Tue, 03 May 2011 23:47 UTC
White House deputy national security advisor John Brennan Tuesday knocked down the myth that waterboarding provided crucial intelligence that led to the location of Osama bin Laden.

"So we've been talking about the different details and methods that lead up to this moment, and obviously there is word out today that waterboarding played a very big role or role in actually getting the information," MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski told Brennan. "Is that the case?"

"Not to my knowledge," Brennan explained.

"The information that was acquired over the course of nine years or so came from many different sources, human sources, technical sources, as well as information that detainees provided, and it was something that as a result of the painstaking work that the analysts did, they pieced it all together that led us to the Abbottabad compound and led us to the successful operation on sunday," he added.

Fox News' Fox Nation website claimed Tuesday that waterboarding led to the death of bin Laden.

Watch this video from MSNBC's Morning Joe, broadcast May 3, 2011.

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Blackbox

Bin Laden tweeter becomes Internet sensation


Raw Story
Tue, 03 May 2011 08:25 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Abbotabad, Pakistan - An IT consultant who hoped for a quiet life in a summer resort town in Pakistan has become an Internet sensation as the first to report the attack on the world's most wanted man.

Sohaib Athar was just another witty voice on micro-blogging site Twitter until he heard the sound of helicopters near his home in a Abbottabad, 30 miles (50 kilometres) north of Islamabad early Monday.

But Athar is now world famous with almost 90,000 Twitter "followers" -- users who keep track of his messages -- as the first person to record the attack on Osama bin Laden's secret hideaway.

He was swamped with emails and interview requests from media around the globe and his blog was even attacked by Internet hackers.

"Bin Laden is dead. I didn't kill him. Please let me sleep now," he wrote on Twitter after the story went around the world.

It began with a tweet in the early hours of Monday morning.

"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)," followed by another; "Go away helicopter before I take out my giant swatter."
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Arrow Down

Cracks in the Pyramid Are Beginning to Show

Justice Little
Intel Daily
Sun, 01 May 2011 21:13 UTC
Bankruptcy
© Tim Boyle/Getty Images
The divide between America's "haves" and "have-nots" is threatening to become a yawning gulf - with great danger to society on the whole.

For months now we have talked about the devil's bargain struck by the powers that be. In that bargain, the artificial recovery has been paid for with stimulus, dollar debasement and corporate cost cutting, with the piece de resistance of jobs moving offshore.

This is a combo that works well for the upper regions of U.S. economic society - the top 30%. The "wealth effect" so cherished by the Federal Reserve, in which Americans feel better about the value of their paper assets going up, requires owning a good chunk of paper assets in the first place.

But the problem with the scheme - as asset values are pumped up and purchasing power is eroded - comes with the bottom 70%.

These are the people who do not matter to the stock market, because they do not drive spending trends. They are not buying yoga pants at LuluLemon Athletica or burritos at Chipotle Mexican Grill. They are not gorging on "stuff." But the top 30% are picking up the slack quite handily... so Wall Street doesn't care.
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People

US: Missouri farmers join class-action suit over levee breach

M.D. Kittle
Southeast Missourian
Tue, 03 May 2011 15:57 UTC
Terry and Mary Beth Lee's farm stands -- or stood -- on the land that her great-great grandfather settled more than 200 years ago. Her dad and mom worked the wheat-rich fields beneath Birds Point levee up until they died within three months of each other in 1993, the year of the last 100-year flood.

"We vowed to them before they died that we were going to go to the farm and build a house there," Mary Beth Lee said.

Today, two centuries and a way of life, is submerged beneath a river of water.
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Cow Skull

36 Statistics Which Prove That The American Dream Is Turning Into An Absolute Nightmare For The Middle Class


End of the American Dream
Mon, 02 May 2011 16:27 UTC
derelict house
The U.S. middle class is being shredded, ripped apart and systematically wiped out. If you doubt this, just check out the statistics below. The American Dream is being transformed into an absolute nightmare. Once upon a time, the rest of the world knew that most Americans were able to live a middle class lifestyle. Most American families had nice homes, most American families had a car or two, most American families had nice clothes, most American families had an overabundance of food and most American families could even look forward to sending their children to college if that is what the kids wanted to do. There was an implicit promise that this was the way that it was always going to be. Most of us grew up believing that if we worked really hard in school and that if we stayed out of trouble and that if we did everything that "the system" told us to do that there would be a place for us in the middle class too. Well, it turns out that "the system" is breaking down.

There aren't enough good jobs for all of us anymore. In fact, there aren't very many crappy jobs either. Millions are out of work, millions have lost their homes and nearly all of the long-term economic trends just keep getting worse and worse. So is there any hope for the U.S. middle class?

No, there is not.
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Mr. Potato

Bizarre Kiss Transmission Device is Supposed to Spread the Love

Glenn Santos
Geeky Gadgets
Tue, 03 May 2011 15:58 UTC
Kissing machine
Come earthquake or high water (really high water), the Japanese are still plugging away at whatever gadget catches their fancy. At least this is the case with a team of researchers from the Kajimoto Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications. Seen below is a young man putting what looks like a liquid soap dispenser in his mouth.

It's actually a tactile communications device, a rather drab term for a machine that transmits the motor sensations of kissing. So it's a two way kissing machine, huh? Here are a few words of explanation for extra insight:

This device is for communications within the mouth, in other words, the goal is to obtain the feeling of kissing."
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Laptop

Bin Laden Death Brings Malware Explosion

Suzanne Choney
MSNBC
Tue, 03 May 2011 15:20 UTC
With the biggest news in a decade dominating the Internet, it didn't take long for rogue viruses, Trojans and other malware to mess with computers given the chance.

Web searches and links to a variety of stories - real and fake - about the death of Osama bin Laden are sprouting with all kinds of malicious software as cybercriminals look for a big payday tied to the appetite for news about the Al-Qaida leader's demise.

"The bad guys were quite fast and started to poison searches results in Google Images," said Favio Assolini, a Kaspersky Labs expert on the security software company's blog. "Some of the search results are now leading users to malicious pages."
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