November 2011
37 posts
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Casino employee denied workers comp after falling... →
Cy Ryan, the Las Vegas Sun:
A casino worker injured when he fell out of his chair while trying to prop his feet on the desk has lost a round in his bid to collect worker’s compensation insurance payments.
The Nevada Supreme Court has ruled there was insufficient evidence for Gary Mogg, an “eye in the sky” at the Fitzgeralds Casino-Hotel, to qualify for industrial insurance...
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New Nixon Tapes Reveal Details of Meeting With... →
Absolutely crazy story + interview by Ray Suarez for PBS Newshour on a jaunt out of the White House by President Nixon in the middle of the night to meet with anti-Vietnam war protestors. Here’s Melvin Small of Wayne State University:
It’s a little odd, because Nixon had been on the phone. He had made 50 phone calls from about 9:00 until 3:30. He called Henry Kissinger eight times....
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At DC DMV: Driver's license, tag renewal, HIV test →
Jessica Gresko, AP:
At one Department of Motor Vehicles’ office in the nation’s capital, motorists can get a driver’s license, temporary tags and something wholly unrelated to the road: a free HIV test.
In a city with one of the highest percentages of residents living with HIV or AIDS, health officials have spent the last year test-driving the HIV screening program. Since the...
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FBI arrests 7 in Amish haircut attacks in Ohio →
AP report:
The leader of a breakaway Amish group allowed the beatings of those who disobeyed him, made some members sleep in a chicken coop and had sexual relations with married women to “cleanse them,” federal authorities said Wednesday as they charged him and six others with hate crimes in hair-cutting attacks against other Amish.
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Several members of the group carried out the...
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South Korean MP lets off teargas in parliament →
How not to spend your Thanksgiving, by Haroon Siddique for The Guardian:
An opposition MP set off a teargas canister in the South Korean parliament in a failed attempt to prevent the ruling party passing a free trade deal with the US.
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Members of the ruling Grand National party were greeted with shouts and screams as they occupied the national assembly’s main hall to railroad the deal....
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Climate change episode of Frozen Planet won't be... →
The Daily Mail:
An episode of the BBC’s Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming. British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn. But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to...
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Wikipedia: Don't Buy This →
Don’t Buy This (also known as: Don’t Buy This: Five of the Worst Games Ever) is a ZX Spectrum compilation. As described on the box, it contains five of the poorest games submitted to Firebird.
Instead of rejecting the submissions, they decided to mock the original developers by releasing them together and publicly brand it as “unoriginal” and “awful”....
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A Chinese Peace Prize Names This Year's Winner.... →
Hanna Beech for Time’s Global Spin blog:
In September, an obscure Chinese cultural organization revealed the finalists for the second annual Confucius Peace Prize, an award that suddenly popped out of nowhere last year after imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. The first Confucius Peace Prize, which was ridiculed as a clumsy attempt to divert attention from...
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Obama Says 'Here in Asia,' But Where Exactly Is... →
MyFox DC with what is perhaps the greatest paragraph ever committed in the name of “news”:
During his press conference in Hawaii, President Obama referenced being “here in Asia.” As Americans know, Hawaii is the 50th state, admitted to the Union on Aug. 21, 1959. Mr. Obama also lists Hawaii as his birthplace, which makes his reference even more curious. So, is Hawaii part...
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ATLAS SHRUGGED Inadvertently Releases Collector’s... →
Press release from the folks behind the Atlas Shrugged film adaptation:
Atlas Productions LLC announced today its plan to replace more than 100,000 title sheets appearing on the Atlas Shrugged Part 1 DVD and Blu-ray versions sold through major retail outlets. These retail versions were packaged with an inaccurate synopsis of Atlas Shrugged. Not affected were the “Special Edition”...
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Arab League votes to suspend Syria if it doesn't... →
Jack Shenker and Peter Beaumont, The Observer:
Syria has been told it will be suspended from the Arab League – and faces the threat of sanctions in the Arab world – if it does not agree to end its bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters. The vote in Cairo took place after Syria had failed to abide by an agreement negotiated by the Arab League to end violence against its people, instead...
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Venezuelan TV: Kidnapped MLB catcher 'found alive' →
Unbelievable story by Mariano Castillo for CNN:
Major league catcher Wilson Ramos has been “found alive,” two days after he was reported kidnapped by gunmen, Venezuelan state TV reported Friday.
Ramos was found by security forces in Montalban, a mountainous region about 60 miles from the north central Venezuelan town where he was last seen, according to a tweet posted late Friday by...
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FDA clears novel heart valve that is implanted... →
The AP:
Federal health officials have approved a first-of-a-kind artificial heart valve that can be implanted without major surgery, offering a new treatment option for patients who are too old or frail for the chest-cracking procedure currently used.
The Food and Drug Administration said late Wednesday it approved Edwards Lifesciences’ Sapien heart valve, which can be threaded into place...
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How man who helped snare 'Merchant of Death' arms... →
Crazy story from the Associated Press:
Carlos Sagastume, 40, earned more than $9 million over 15 years by risking his life to convince drug dealers and a weapons merchant that he was a criminal.
Collecting evidence against Viktor Bout was another major achievement in a remarkable career for Mr Sagastume.
He posed as a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also known as FARC,...
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“For whatever reason, it has proven difficult in states like Wisconsin and Ohio...”
– John McCormack, pondering a puzzler at The Weekly Standard. Yesterday, Ohio voted quite soundly to repeal a law limiting collective bargaining rights of public workers.
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Cleaner removes 'stain' from acclaimed artwork →
Matthew Day, the Telegraph:
A determined German cleaner destroyed a piece of art valued at £690,000 by cleaning away what she thought was an unsightly stain from the artwork.
The cleaner got to work on an installation by the late and famed artist Martin Kippenberger at a museum in Dortmund.
Entitled “When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings” the piece comprised a tower of wooden slats with a...
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Translation algorithms used to crack centuries-old... →
Mark Brown, Wired UK:
Computer scientists from Sweden and the United States have applied modern-day, statistical translation techniques — the sort of which that are used in Google Translate — to decode a 250-year old secret message.
The original document, nicknamed the Copiale Cipher, was written in the late 18th century and found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War.
Neato tale of...
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/usr/lib →
From an article by April Corbin for the Las Vegas Sun on coworking in Las Vegas:
Pawel Szymczykowski’s /usr/lib/ (pronounced “user lib” short for “user library”) is one of them. Located on the second floor of Emergency Arts downtown, /usr/lib/ is a multi-use space designed to provide people with resources, a place to work and space to hold meetings or special...
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Andy Rooney Dead at 92 →
Good night, sweet prince.
(You may be interested in Nullary Sources’s previous coverage of Andy Rooney — we did a brief retrospective when he retired last month.)
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U.S. cuts funding for UNESCO with Palestinans... →
The Associated Press:
The Obama administration cut off funding for the UN cultural agency on Monday, after its member countries defied an American warning and approved a Palestinian bid for full membership.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the vote triggered a long-standing congressional restriction on funding to UN bodies that recognize Palestine as a state before an...
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