Internet boy convicted of own murder

Internet boy convicted of grooming his own killer

A 15-year-old grammar school boy yesterday became the first person in Britain to be convicted of inciting someone to murder him.

Bizarre tale of boy who used internet to plot his own murder
The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. "U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??" said one message. "Yes," came the reply.
Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young "victim" became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder.

Only on the internet!

Dieter Sues Atkins, Says Diet Clogged Arteries

Dieter Sues Atkins, Says Diet Clogged Arteries
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A man who blames his heart disease on the Atkins diet said on Thursday he is suing the privately held Atkins Inc. to force it to disclose what he called the risks of the popular high-fat, low-carb regimen.

Jody Gorran of Delray Beach, Florida, said he could show that he had low cholesterol and no heart disease before he started the diet, but quickly developed clogged arteries afterwards.

Now, what if he wins?
Will it lead to an avalanche of lawsuits clogging the judicial arteries of the Courts?

Face Transplant

US surgeons plan first face transplant
The Scotsman - American surgeons claim to be on the brink of carrying out the first face transplant.

Plastic surgeons from the University of Louisville in Kentucky are in the process of requesting formal permission to go ahead with the controversial procedure to graft the face of a dead donor on to someone who has suffered severe disfigurement.

What can you add to that?! Don't watch the movie 'Face Off' 'cause it will give you nightmares?

Gmail

My Left Arm for a Gmail Account
Wired News - What's an invitation for a Gmail account worth?

If you have an invitation to open an account on Google's new e-mail service, you could sell it on eBay for as much as $60. But if cash is a little too prosaic for you, your Gmail invitation could net you 4 pounds of fresh fudge, some Jewish mystical knowledge, a photo of a wife and a girlfriend kissing, a tarantula, Paris Hilton's phone number or any one of more than 1,000 other options ...
More ...

If you get an invite to join Gmail, grab it while you can still obtain a good gmail.com name!
Who knows? Pretty soon, your gmail name could be worth a lot to the right buyer. This is because gmail accounts will be sold as commodities ... (even though it is against the TOS and I am in no way advocating such a procedure)

Pssst! Wanna buy an invite to Gmail? Try eBay!

Torture

Army, CIA want torture truths exposed
UPI - WASHINGTON, May 18 (UPI) -- Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day.

Over the past weekend and into this week, devastating new allegations have emerged putting Stephen Cambone, the first Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, firmly in the crosshairs and bringing a new wave of allegations cascading down on the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he scarcely had time to catch his breath from the previous ones.

Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3½ years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time.
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Mathematical Proof Girls Are Evil

Mathematical Proof That Girls are EVIL

Mathematical proof that girls are evil
From Scripting.com

Finally! Proof! I've been saying it for years but I never thought I would see scientific proof in my lifetime!

Disabled People Can Sue States

Disabled People Can Sue States
Yahoo! - WASHINGTON - Disabled people can sue if states ignore a landmark civil rights law that protects their rights, a divided Supreme Court ruled Monday in the case of a paraplegic man who crawled up the steps of a small-town courthouse because there was no elevator for his wheelchair.

The 5-4 ruling marks a limited but important endorsement of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, a law meant to ensure equal treatment for the disabled in many areas of life.

Access to courts and the services they provide is a basic right, and the ADA properly gives private citizens such as George Lane the power to sue for damages if a state fails to live up to that promise, the liberal-led majority ruled.
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Work Porn

Work porn risk for businesses
BBC - Prison sentences could await business bosses who do not do enough to stop the most serious abuse of computer networks by employees.

The warning comes from legal experts who say firms are open to prosecution because they are so ignorant about what employees are doing with company computers.

In the most serious cases some firms are unknowingly harbouring illegal images on work PCs and servers.

Firms are being urged to take the problem of network abuse as seriously as they do fire prevention.
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"As seriously as fire prevention?" Does that entail hosing down anyone caught looking a porn?

Amnesiacs Remember

New Discovery Helps Amnesiacs Keep Their Memories
Newswise — Amnesia sufferers can lose their short-term memories within one minute of the initial thought. While such things as head injuries and strokes are known to cause amnesia, very little is known about why such severe memory loss occurs. However, a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher has discovered that some amnesiacs can maintain their memories for a longer period of time if they spend time sitting in a dark, quiet room.

I bet the reason this happens is because the hypothalamus is given more time to process the information.
In a light, activity filled room, an injured brain would be unable to 'buffer' since priority would be given to the visual information.
The darkened room would allow the hypothalamus to buffer the information long enough to get through the bottleneck.

Legal Wranglings on the name eBay

eBay Watch
Subject: Domain Name Registration - ebay-watch.org
From: enforcement@ebay.com

We are writing concerning your registration of ebay-watch.org which contains the famous eBay trademark.
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Have a read through this stuff. It should be interesting to see how this develops

Designer Virus Stalks HIV

This was always going to happen sooner rather than later. I just wish it had been later!

Designer Virus Stalks HIV
Wired News - BERKELEY, California -- It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.

That's because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assistant professors created a virus altered to latch onto HIV and mute its ability to become AIDS. They've tested the theory in a computer model, and in cells in a dish. The results have been promising, and if they continue in that vein, the researchers could begin animal testing by the end of this year.

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The problem with designer viruses is there is no way to predict how they will react in the wild. For all anyone knows, the designer virus will exchange RNA segments with a harmless one and turn it into a killer.

You couldn't make this stuff up!

Pediatrician Warns Parents About Cicadas
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - First there was the girl who fell off her bike fleeing a flying cicada. Then a boy trying to swat a cicada out of the air with a baseball bat instead hit his friend in the nose.

The final straw came when another child hurt his hand trying to squish a cicada under a car's tires. Dr. Ray Baker of Cincinnati Children's Hospital was convinced -- cicadas can be a safety hazard to children.

Starting this week and lasting into June, billions and possibly even trillions of cicadas will emerge across much of the eastern half of the United States.

The thumb-sized insects are harmless, but they are large, noisy and clumsy. They climb out of their underground homes en masse after 17 years of slow development with only one goal in mind -- finding a mate.

The last time this happened ...
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Phatbot steals credit card details

Phatbot primed to steal your credit card details
The Register - A Trojan horse-type computer virus called Phatbot can steal credit card numbers and launch denial of service attacks on Web sites.

bmj.com Table of Contents (May 15 2004, 328 [7449])
Online communication improves the quality of health care ...

Learning from e-patients at Massachusetts General Hospital
John Lester et al. - In 1994, as a part of an initiative by the department of neurology of the Massachusetts General Hospital to develop promising new ways of using information technology, we began to study how patients with neurological concerns were using online health resources. To our surprise, we found that thousands of patients and their care givers had already created an impressive variety of online health resources. The online support groups, each devoted to a single neurological condition, were especially intriguing.

Tracking the spammers

The Spamhaus Project
Spamhaus tracks the Internet's Spammers, Spam Gangs and Spam Services, provides dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, and works with Law Enforcement to identify and pursue spammers worldwide.

Medicdirect - Comprehensive UK Health Information
UK based, top of the range, Health Information Site. They don't come much better than this one.

Web logs mirrored the disturbing Photos of Iraqis Being Abused by US Personnel and offered the rare opportunity to peruse the complete text of a classified military report, HEARING ARTICLE 15-6: INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADEdescribing the potentially criminal behavior of its own soldiers.

It's a war - we all knew it would happen to some degree or other, distasteful as it may be to our hypocritical morals, however, the real issue is taking bloody pictures!
Whoever gave permission for photographs to be taken should either be sent to a Mental Hospital for life or Court Martialled and publicly flogged with wet, diarrohea-filled stockings for 3 months.

White-nosed Rats

Cravings reduced in rehab rats: Discovery might help cocaine addicts kick the habit.

If your 'stash' has vanished, look for the white-nosed rodent; know what I mean?

Alzheimer's Drug Improves Memory and Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Alzheimer’s Drug Improves Memory, Cognition in MS Patients
NewsWise - A drug widely used for treating dementia in Alzheimer’s patients has been shown to improve memory and cognition in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients who are mild to moderately cognitively impaired.

Most MS patients and their doctors focus primarily on managing the physical manifestations that characterize the disease, yet an estimated 50 percent of the patients will also face varying degrees of cognitive impairment. Cognitive impairment can include difficulties with problem-solving, attention, learning and memory, and can lead to loss of jobs, social withdrawal, and changes in mood. Only 10 percent of all MS patients will experience severe cognitive impairment, but even mild impairment can interfere significantly in a patient’s life.