Eideard

A Roman Catholic priest allegedly seduced a 17-year-old girl while she was a senior at a Catholic high school in Reading into a sexual relationship that resulted in her giving birth at age 19, according to a civil lawsuit filed by her parents in Berks County Court.

According to the lawsuit, the Rev. Luis A. Bonilla Margarito was removed as chaplain of Reading Central Catholic High School and pastor of St. Joseph Church in Reading after the parents secretly video-taped him having sexual intercourse with their daughter in the basement of their home in November.

By then, she had graduated from high school and had turned 18 years old, but the lawsuit alleges the sexual relationship began when she was still in high school. The lawsuit says the parents allowed their daughter to meet with the priest for counseling because she had severe mental health issues as a result of prior sexual abuse by another adult male…

The Allentown Diocese announced Bonilla was removed as priest of St. Joseph’s in November because he had a relationship with an 18-year-old woman…A church spokesman said Bonilla would be sent to a treatment facility and no criminal charges were pending.

But the lawsuit alleges church officials knew of the “illicit relationship” when it first began and that it had continued after she graduated.

The parents decided to video-tape one of the counseling sessions their daughter had with Bonilla because they had become suspicious of his intentions, the lawsuit said. The parents claim in the lawsuit they overheard Bonilla tell their daughter she didn’t have to obey them anymore because she was 18. They also claim he alienated their daughter from them by “leading them to believe his relationship with their daughter was superior to theirs…”

The lawsuit says the parents gave money to the church and school expecting that their daughter would be protected from “sexual abuse and exploitation by sexual predators such as Father Bonilla.”

Not an unreasonable expectation, I would say. If you believe.

A public relations company and its owner have been cited for having staff post glowing reviews of game applications for companies it represents at the online iTunes store.

According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Reverb Communications and its owner Tracie Snitker engaged in deceptive advertising by having its employees pose as ordinary consumers when posting the reviews.

“Companies, including public relations firms involved in online marketing need to abide by long-held principles of truth in advertising,” said Mary Engle, director of the FTC’s advertising practices division.

The California-based Reverb Communications represents dozens of major video game companies and developers.

The FTC, however, claims Reverb did not disclose the reviews were written by its staff, nor that they were hired to promote the games and that they often received a percentage of the sales.

That information is relevant to consumers who were using the endorsements as a guide to whether or not to buy the games…

Under a proposed settlement order, Reverb will have to remove any previously posted endorsements that misrepresent the authors as ordinary consumers.

Sleaze ain’t any less relevant when it’s geeks and gamers indulging in the practice.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The story begins, in a sense, in classrooms around the world, where students are taught that the rate of decay of a specific radioactive material is a constant. This concept is relied upon, for example, when anthropologists use carbon-14 to date ancient artifacts and when doctors determine the proper dose of radioactivity to treat a cancer patient…

But that assumption was challenged in an unexpected way by a group of researchers from Purdue University who at the time were more interested in random numbers than nuclear decay. Ephraim Fischbach, a physics professor at Purdue, was looking into the rate of radioactive decay of several isotopes as a possible source of random numbers generated without any human input.

As the researchers pored through published data on specific isotopes, they found disagreement in the measured decay rates – odd for supposed physical constants.

Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer…

On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.

If this apparent relationship between flares and decay rates proves true, it could lead to a method of predicting solar flares prior to their occurrence, which could help prevent damage to satellites and electric grids, as well as save the lives of astronauts in space…

Jenkins and Fischbach guessed that the culprits in this bit of decay-rate mischief were probably solar neutrinos, the almost weightless particles famous for flying at almost the speed of light through the physical world – humans, rocks, oceans or planets – with virtually no interaction with anything…

Their findings strengthened the argument that the strange swings in decay rates were caused by neutrinos from the sun. The swings seemed to be in synch with the Earth’s elliptical orbit, with the decay rates oscillating as the Earth came closer to the sun (where it would be exposed to more neutrinos) and then moving away…

Read the rest of this entry »

Chief Farcical Officer
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Facebook, which has gone after sites with the word “book” in their names, is also trying to trademark the word “face,” according to court documents.

But the social networking site has met with a familiar foe. As TechCrunch first reported, Aaron Greenspan has asked for an extension of time to file an opposition to Facebook’s attempt. Greenspan is the president and CEO of Think Computer, the developer of a mobile payments app called FaceCash.

“I’d bet against ‘face’ being awarded to Facebook,” said Henry Sneath, a patent and trademark lawyer based in Pittsburgh. “You cannot overtake the use of a generic word people use in everyday speech…”

Facebook’s separate fight over “book,” on the other hand, has been more of a David vs. Goliath saga.

As CNNMoney reported Thursday, Facebook is suing start-up site Teachbook.com — which claims it is merely a teacher’s community. The social networking giant also forced the travel site PlaceBook to change its name to TripTrace earlier this month.

In the case of Teachbook, Facebook would have to prove the site caused “a likelihood of confusion,” said Sneath, the trademark lawyer. That’s a steep burden, he said, but Facebook could succeed.

I thoroughly understand the need for existing copyright-holders to press to defend their mark against every interloper no matter how small. No matter how laughable.

In this case, I think “egregious,” greedy and grasping might be a better fit.

A “ghost hunter” waiting for a phantom train on a North Carolina trestle was killed by a real one Friday after trying to save a woman, witnesses said.

Christopher Kaiser, 29, was killed and the woman was seriously injured investigators said.

Kaiser and 12 fellow ghost hunters had gathered on the 119th anniversary of North Carolina’s Bostian Bridge train wreck, The Charlotte Observer reported…

A woman who was with the group was seriously injured and airlifted to a hospital. Witnesses said Kaiser pushed her out of the way before he was hit.

I wonder if this will turn into the “curse” of the train of North Carolina’s Bostian Bridge train wreck. Superstition always finds a way to modify itself to avoid extinction.

________________________
Thanks, Morey.

Some men can wear pink – some can’t

The blonde bandit with the handbag and the handgun was no lady.

A cross-dressing crook in a pink jumpsuit held up a Long Island stationery store, only to find his efforts thwarted when the cash register wouldn’t open, Nassau County police said.

The white male, believed to be in his late 20s or early 30s, sported the blonde wig and the summery outfit Thursday afternoon when he entered the C&R Stationery Store in Lynbrook.

The pretty-in-pink bandit pulled a handgun from his off-white purse and ordered the female store clerk to empty the register, police said Friday.

When the panicked clerk couldn’t get to the cash quickly enough, the bandit settled for swiping a bottle of Gatorade before fleeing on his bicycle from the storefront shop on Union Ave., cops said…

Police planned to review footage from the store’s surveillance camera in their effort to track down the suspect.

And then pass it along to Jon Stewart, I imagine.

Photo by Jamie Rogers

A 37-year-old man picking items out of a dumpster was seriously injured Thursday when the dumpster was emptied into a garbage truck in Vancouver’s West End.

The binner was in serious condition in hospital with broken bones and severe bruising. He was rescued after several people heard him crying for help when the truck was in the 800 block of Cardero Street.

The man told police he was in a dumpster near Burrard and Davie streets when it was picked up by the truck, a distance of about 16 blocks from where he was rescued.

Police said garbage collection continued, which means he had a number of additional dumpster-loads of garbage dumped on him as the Waste Control Service truck followed its route through the West End.

Vancouver police Const. Jana McGuinness said a woman who heard the man’s cries ran into the lane off Cardero Street to alert the driver, who immediately stopped, called 911 and opened the back of the truck…

The driver was so shaken he booked off work after the incident, said Waste Control Service manager Jeremy Crawford, adding that to his knowledge, it was the first incident of its kind involving the company.

Police investigated the incident as a “casualty call” and did not lay blame, calling it an accident.

Climbing into a dumpster regardless of motivation is reasonably dumb. If you know anything about where you’re scavenging, you should know that drivers work alone – and dumpsters are designed for automated pickup.

No one is going to climb up top and peer inside to see if it’s clear of scavengers. Whether they’re people or rodents.

U.S. and international wheat breeders said Friday publication of the gene map of wheat could eventually help in developing beneficial new varieties, but cautioned that cracking wheat’s complicated genetic code is far from completed.

British researchers working with the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium on Friday released the first version of the wheat genome, a step toward a fully analyzed map that should help wheat breeders develop varieties that can yield more despite drought or disease.

“This is significant progress,” said Kellye Eversole, executive director of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC). “It is a very useful contribution towards the final goal of a genome sequence-based platform for wheat breeding. While we are nowhere near cracking the genetic code and far from having all of the information needed to understand the wheat genome, we are moving forward…”

The IWGSC was established by a group of plant scientists, breeders, and growers to sequence the highly complex wheat genome. Wheat has been viewed as all but impossible to sequence because of its sheer size.

Like all plants, wheat has far more complex DNA than animals. It is made up of 17 billion base pairs of the chemicals that make up DNA — five times more than the human genome.

The public release of the wheat genome data should provide a foundation to identify genetic differences between wheat varieties, wheat breeding experts said. Much more work remains to be done to discover what the genetic data means.

Lots of hard work ahead. Needless to say, climate change only adds to the questions needing to be asked and answered.

Assuring that artificial limitations are not imposed by profiteers or Luddites will probably consume a certain amount of time.

Port Orchard, Washington –

A 33-year-old Bremerton man showed up for a court appearance on a meth charge Tuesday carrying a bag of the drug in his pants pocket, according to documents filed in Kitsap County District Court.

Before making his court appearance, the man had to be booked into and released from the Kitsap County jail. That’s standard procedure for these sorts of crimes, officials said.

While at the jail, a guard performed a security pat-down and found a bag of meth in the man’s right front pocket. The 33-year-old was then booked into the Kitsap County jail on $10,000 bail on the new felony possession charge.

Uh – OK. You were expecting maybe Willie Sutton?

Children running for class officer posts at a Mississippi public school are only allowed to compete for certain positions based on their race, according to a memo handed out last week to students.

The Nettleton Middle School elections are divided between offices pegged for black and white students, according to the memo, which was provided to TSG by a parent. The document was handed out to every student in the school’s sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and it details the race requirements for each of four class officer spots (president, vice president, secretary-treasurer, and reporter).

Of the 12 offices for which students compete, eight are earmarked for white students (including the three class president spots), while four are termed “black” seats. Middle school administrators have not returned TSG phone calls, so it is unclear how this policy was established, or whether the number of offices apportioned for each race changes annually. Additionally, it is unknown how children who are not black or white would run for student government offices.

Students seeking class office were directed to return their election applications, complete with the petition signatures of 10 classmates, to science teacher Jenny Payne by August 24. The Nettleton middle school has about 400 students, and about 72 percent are white, according to a source familiar with the school board’s operation. The majority of the remaining students are black.

The city of Nettleton has a population of 2013 and is located 15 miles south of Tupelo, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The middle school’s policy was first reported this week by Suzy Richardson, who operates Mixed and Happy, a blog about mixed-race families.

Suzy Richardson is to the point over at her blog – as we all should be. Email the presidential-wanna-be Republican governor of Mississippi, Hayley Barbour – governor@governor.state.ms.us – and tell him to get his butt on the phone to the racist fools running the schools in Nettleton. Tell them to join up with the United States of America.