Eideard

Some of her friends

A Zimbabwean man has told a court that he hired a prostitute who during the night transformed into a donkey, and that he is now “seriously in love” with the animal, according to state media.

Moyo has been charged with bestiality. The court has ordered him to undergo a mental examination, The Herald said.

“I think I am also a donkey. I do not know what happened when I left the bar, but I am seriously in love with (the) donkey,” Sunday Moyo told the court…

Moyo, 28, was arrested in the town of Zvishavane, about 185 miles south of the capital Harare on Sunday…

Moyo has been charged with bestiality and remanded in custody. The court has ordered him to undergo a mental examination…

Uh, OK. Anyone have a better excuse?

Members of the US army’s 502nd Regiment fire a mortar during 2010′s Operation Hamkari in Kandahar, Afghanistan. This image is part of a winning portfolio for the army photographic competition 2011.

Bravo.

BG Group Plc will buy 3.5 million metric tons a year of liquefied natural gas from Cheniere Energy Partner LP’s terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana, bringing U.S. exports a step closer.

The 20-year contract is Cheniere’s first long-term sales agreement for exports from the terminal’s proposed plant in Cameron Parish and may help the company raise finance to begin construction of the facilities that will chill the gas, turning it into liquid for transportation, BG Group said in a statement…

Surging shale gas production has reversed declining output in the U.S., now the world’s largest gas producer ahead of Russia. Companies including Cheniere plan to convert LNG import terminals into export plants.

…Profitability of U.S. exports is determined by the price difference between gas and crude oil. Oil is sometimes used as a power generation fuel, and is also used as a reference in setting Asian long-term energy contract prices…

Shipments may start as soon as 2018, Elizabeth Spomer, senior vice president for business development, said.

Cheniere has said it plans to sell LNG to Caribbean nations for power generation to cut their dependence on crude oil. Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are among those that could save money by burning gas to generate electricity, Cheniere’s chief executive officer Charif Souki has said.

And, someday – just maybe someday – the political blockheads in Washington will realize that both American consumers and American investors would benefit from including natural gas as a leading producer of electricity in this land of ours.

I ain’t holding my breath waiting, though.

 
South Africa’s advertising watchdog has banned a television commercial depicting angels falling from heaven because they are attracted to a man’s deodorant after a complaint from a Christian.

The advertisement for Axe deodorant (known as Lynx in Britain) features winged, attractive women crashing to earth in an Italian town.

The scantily-clad women are then drawn towards a seemingly unremarkable man preparing to get on a moped. They regard their quarry lasciviously while sniffing the air before one by one smashing their halos and advancing towards him.

A viewer who complained to South Africa’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the suggestion that God’s messengers would literally fall for a mortal being because of a deodorant was incompatible with his belief as a Christian.

ASA agreed, and ordered Unilver SA, which sells Axe deodorants, to withdraw the advertisement.

As such, the problem is not so much that angels are used in the commercial, but rather that the angels are seen to forfeit, or perhaps forego their heavenly status for mortal desires,” it said in a statement.

Idiots. Not just the dweeb who made the complaint, of course; but, the petty bureaucrats who made the decision to ban the commercial.

Like – if you don’t like the commercial don’t buy the fracking deodorant!

The world’s oldest scientific academy, the Royal Society, has made its historical journal, which includes over 8000 scientific papers, permanently free to access online.

The plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of its editor – just a few of the early setbacks that hit the Royal Society’s early editions of the Philosophical Transactions. But against the odds the publication, which first appeared in 1665, survived. Its archives offer a fascinating window on the history of scientific progress over the last few centuries.

Nestling amongst illustrious papers by Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution, including gruesome tales of students being struck by lightning and experimental blood transfusions.

RTFA – more important, visit the site. Enjoy wandering through the history of many minds in the quest for knowledge.

Preet Bharara and Ray Kelly
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Five active and three retired officers of the New York Police Department are among 12 people charged Tuesday with conspiring to transport and distribute firearms and stolen goods…

“A group of crime fighters took to moonlighting as criminals,” Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a press conference.

The defendants are charged in an alleged conspiracy to transport and distribute untraceable firearms across state lines. and conspiracy to transport supposedly stolen and counterfeit goods including cigarettes from Virginia and slot machines from Atlantic City, New Jersey…

The current or former NYPD officers charged are William Masso, Eddie Goris, Ali Oklu, Gary Oritz, and John Mahony, all active-duty officers in Brooklyn; Joseph Trischitta and Marco Venezia, who were active-duty NYPD officers at the time of the alleged crimes but are now retired; and Richard Melnik, a retired NYPD officer. Also charged, federal authorities said, are Anthony Santiago, a New York City Department of Sanitation police officer; David Kanwisher, a New Jersey corrections officer; and Michael Gee and Eric Gomer, who court documents list as “associates” of Santiago…

Prosecutors said that while the defendants all believed the items they transported were stolen; they had in fact been provided by the FBI. The firearms were never a danger to the public, authorities said, as they had been rendered inoperable.

“These crimes are without question, reprehensible — particularly conspiring to import untraceable guns and assault rifles into New York,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York division. “The public trusts the police not only to enforce the law, but to obey it. These crimes, as alleged in the complaint, do nothing but undermine public trust and confidence in law enforcement.”

You got that right.

We’re fortunate to have someone like Preet Bharara operating in New York, nowadays. Seems like I get to note his name in a crime-busting case every couple of months.

New research from SMU’s Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org, documents significant geothermal resources across the United States capable of producing more than three million megawatts of green power – 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants today.

Sophisticated mapping produced from the research, viewable via Google Earth at www.google.org/egs, demonstrates that vast reserves of this green, renewable source of power generated from the Earth’s heat are realistically accessible using current technology.

The results of the new research – from SMU Professor David Blackwell and Geothermal Lab Coordinator Maria Richards – confirm and refine locations for resources capable of supporting large-scale commercial geothermal energy production under a wide range of geologic conditions, including significant areas in the eastern two-thirds of the United States. The estimated amounts and locations of heat stored in the Earth’s crust included in this study are based on nearly 35,000 data sites – approximately twice the number used for Blackwell and Richards’ 2004 Geothermal Map of North America, leading to improved detail and contouring at a regional level…

“This assessment of geothermal potential will only improve with time,” said Blackwell. “Our study assumes that we tap only a small fraction of the available stored heat in the Earth’s crust, and our capabilities to capture that heat are expected to grow substantially as we improve upon the energy conversion and exploitation factors through technological advances and improved techniques.”

RTFA. Wonderful potential, realizable in real political time in any nation willing to make a commitment to clean energy sources.

Download the link to Google Earth to view what exists in your own neck of the prairie [If you're in the United States].

An Australian woman is suing the nation’s top four banks for their alleged role in laundering money from her teenage son’s $200,000 eBay scam that afforded him a $6,000-a-day playboy lifestyle.

Australian media reported that in 2007, the then 14 year old boy was making so much money selling non-existent laptops, mobile phones and watches on eBay he could afford to book a $4300-a-night penthouses overlooking Sydney Harbour, fly friends interstate for lavish parties and hire limousines to take him to the beach…

Reports said she was seeking an apology from the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac and NAB for ”unconscionable conduct” after allegedly allowing her son to open numerous bank accounts with debit cards “without reasonable scrutiny”.

She claims the banks ignored her or refused to discuss the matter for privacy reasons when she warned them they had issued accounts that were being used by a minor to bank illegal funds, reports said.

”He was an intelligent boy who worked out how to cheat the system and play it for all it was worth,” she told Australia’s Sun Herald newspaper. ”As his parent and legal guardian, I begged the banks to stop giving him accounts and debit cards but each time I got nowhere because of the Privacy Act…”

Police eventually arrested the boy at school after many of the frauds were linked to an IP address attached to a classroom computer.

Reports said that during the past four years, she had reluctantly handed her son to the police 15 times.

Sounds like banks in Oz would have been happy to help out Bernie Madoff given half a chance.

Go for it, Mom. Make them own up for their scandalous lack of standards.

Directing traffic in Baghdad

A US government watchdog has criticised a programme to train Iraqi police, saying it could become a “bottomless pit” for American money.

The report said only some 12% of the money spent in 2011 would be spent directly helping Iraq’s police. It also pointed out that the programme had yet to gain the support of the Iraqi government…

The programme for police training is run by the Department of State, which took over the role from the Department of Defense this month.

The report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) said the Department of State had failed to put a plan in place for assessing the current and future capabilities of the Iraqi police…

“What tangible benefit will Iraqis see from this police training program? With most of the money spent on lodging, security, support, all the MOI [Iraqi Ministry of the Interior] gets is a little expertise, and that is if the program materialises,” Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi was cited as telling the report’s authors…

SIGIR’s inspector general said the state department did not fully co-operate with the report… Har!

According to the SIGIR report [.pdf], the US has spent about $8 billion on training Iraq’s police force since the US-led invasion in 2003, which by 2010 included 412,000 officers.

There was a great quote on Tom Keene’s mid-day TV show, today, when an economics professor was asked [in a different context] about changes in governance between George W. Bush and Barack Obama: “We were promised change and what we got was continuity.”

The incompetence and inefficiencies of outsourcing military tasks to mercenaries is consistent throughout post-invasion responsibilities in Iraq. Crap building of infrastructure is matched by crap governance, crap security and policing.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

An 87-year-old Indiana man was arraigned on drug charges in federal court in Detroit on Monday after police found 228 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $2.9 million in his pickup following a routine traffic stop.

A state trooper patrolling Interstate 94 near Ann Arbor pulled over Leo Earl Sharp on Friday for following too closely and executing an improper lane change, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court.

When the trooper asked Sharp if he could search the truck, the octogenarian refused. So the trooper requested a backup unit with a dog trained to detect bombs and illegal drugs.

…During a subsequent search of the truck bed, troopers found 104 bricks of cocaine stashed in five bags…

Sharp was charged with conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute cocaine. If convicted, he faces at least 10 years in prison.

This is beginning to give me an idea. Just as young punks often score a break on being convicted of a crime – “Don’t saddle this poor child with a lifetime of shame because of his first mistake” – I wonder if grayhead gangsters might start looking for special dispensation because of age?

BTW – no mention of how a couple hundred pounds of blow got all the way up to Indiana? And only $10,000 bail for a dude trucking around almost $3,000,000 in drugs?