Eideard

 
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown Sirte, Libya’s interim rulers said.

His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.

“He (Gaddafi) was also hit in his head,” National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”

Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. He said he had been taken away by an ambulance…

His capture followed within minutes of the fall of Sirte, a development that extinguished the last significant resistance by forces loyal to the deposed leader.

The capture of Sirte and the death of Gaddafi means Libya’s ruling NTC should now begin the task of forging a new democratic system which it had said it would get under way after the city, built as a showpiece for Gaddafi’s rule, had fallen.

Overdue.

CONFIRMED.

Angry Birds, the hugely popular mobile phone game, is played by 30 million people every day for a total of 300 million minutes, its creators have revealed.

The simple game, which is made by Rovio, a Finnish company, is played by around 130 million people every month.

The figures were announced by Andrew Stalbow, Rovio’s American chief at the annual Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco…

Stalbow said that company was now focusing building a “next generation digital entertainment company” and growing the game into a “big entertainment franchise”. Rovio’s new ventures are set to include an Angry Birds cookbook of egg recipes. In Angry Birds, the birds are angry because their eggs have been stolen by the pigs.

Stalbow also confirmed to The Telegraph that the Angry Birds movie is slated for release in 2014, after a series of cartoons have been released…

The company’s second largest market after the US is now China, where both the game and merchandise such as toys and jumpers are hugely popular.

Obviously, with this number of people enjoying the game instead of their job or studies – it must be the work of the AntiChrist. Or at least someone who doesn’t vote Republican/Tory/Conservative.

Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and partner at the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, is talking up a handful of companies he’s invested in that make use of abundant materials — in some cases materials that get thrown away or burned up — to make valuable commodities and reduce carbon emissions and replace petroleum. He described the new companies today at the Emtech Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Solidia: The company, based on technology developed at Rutgers, is using carbon dioxide to make building materials that have the strength of concrete, but that rather than emitting one ton of carbon dioxide per ton of concrete, Joy says, it actually uses carbon dioxide as a building material.

Siluria: Natural gas is extremely abundant, but it’s not useful for much other than burning it to generate electricity. Unlike oil, it isn’t a good building block for drugs and plastics. And unlike oil, it’s difficult to ship. To this day, some oil fields burn off the natural gas that comes up the well because there’s no economic way to get it to market. Siluria is using directed evolution techniques developed at MIT to quickly sort through large numbers of potential catalysts for breaking down methane and forming building blocks that can be used to make ethylene, an important feedstock material, and eventually a range of chemicals and liquid fuels. The company says it’s catalysts work well enough now to make liquid fuels at about $50 a barrel.

Renmatix: Cellulosic materials like wood chips are abundant, but turning them into sugar, which can be used to make ethanol and diesel—is expensive. Renmatix uses water at high temperatures and pressures to break cellulose down. The company says it will be cheaper because it doesn’t require the enzymes or expensive catalysts used in current methods.

Aquion: The company is building cheap batteries to store power from wind turbines and solar panels, which could be key to making up for the variability of these electricity sources. The battery uses abundant materials—manganese, salt, water, and carbon—rather than potentially expensive metals like nickel.

My favorite is the last-named, Aquion. Some portion of many resource and environment-saving processes is electricity. No matter how it is generated – hopefully from natural forces or a renewable resource – inexpensive storage is a necessity.

I’d love an affordable opportunity to stop subsidizing the lifestyle of our power utility executives.

Rental RV ready to tow away from the courthouse
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

It’s one thing for tipsy teenagers to break into a county courthouse and clown around with a judge’s robe and gavel. If you’re a foreign national suspected of such behavior, you’ll get a whole lot more attention.

Five young men learned that Wednesday in San Antonio, Texas, after the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security joined an investigation that will determine whether the incident was an escapade or part of a terrorism plot.

So far, Bexar County officials said Wednesday afternoon, it appears to be a prank. “I think probably, if their mother found out, she wouldn’t approve,” Sheriff Amadeo Ortiz said.

Ortiz said the five men who had reportedly been traveling in an RV are from France. Luis Antu, a spokesman for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, said the men, in their 20s, claimed to be French Moroccan…

Authorities say two of the men climbed a fire escape and entered through a fourth-floor window shortly before 1:30 a.m. A video image released by authorities shows two people walking or running down a hallway while wearing sombreros.

Alarms sounded. Police quickly had the place surrounded. But they bided their time during the 30-minute incident, authorities said…The pair exited the courthouse and, along with three others outside, including one sitting in an RV, were arrested…

According to the security surveillance tape, the two suspects “were playing with a judge’s gavel and robes,” the spokesman said. “They went into one of the libraries and put on sombreros and were walking around the halls…”

As a precaution, a bomb-sniffing dog was brought to the site and searched the facility.

There’s a distinct possibility they were plastered. Beer cans were found in their rental RV – and in the courtroom. It’s presumed the beer cans were theirs.

An ice cream vendor who peddled prescription painkillers from the same truck he sold frozen treats to kids, was sentenced on Tuesday to three and a half years in prison.

The sentence was part of a plea deal struck by Louis Scala, 30, the head of a $1 million drug-trafficking ring run out of his Lickety Split truck, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in August to one count of conspiracy and one count of criminal possession of a controlled substance.

Scala, 30, obtained the drugs with a prescription pad stolen by an accomplice from a Manhattan doctor’s office. Through a network of more than two dozen runners, he was able to get nearly 43,000 oxycodone pills between July 2009 and June 2010, with a street value of $20 apiece…

Scala drove his Lickety Split truck through neighborhoods in Staten Island, selling ice cream to children while inviting adults into the back to buy pills.

American entrepreneurs are truly special.

Cantaloupes rotting in the Jensen Farms fields in Colorado
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Potentially contaminated processing equipment and problems with packing and storage of whole cantaloupes at a Colorado farm likely led to the deadliest listeria outbreak in the United States in 25 years, which has so far claimed 25 lives in a dozen states…

Pools of water on the floor of the Jensen Farms packing facility in Granada, Colo., equipment that was not easily cleaned and sanitized and failure to cool newly harvested cantaloupes before sending them to cold storage all contributed to the outbreak, the first-ever listeria contamination blamed on whole melons, federal Food and Drug Administration officials said Wednesday…

Investigators tested fruit samples and equipment from Jensen Farms and confirmed the presence of four outbreak strains of the listeria monocytogenes bacteria confirmed in the illnesses and deaths.

The FDA said Jensen Farms, which is based in Holly, Colo., had recently bought used equipment that was corroded and hard to clean. For example, the equipment used to wash and dry cantaloupe showed signs of dirt and product build-up, even after it had been disassembled, cleaned and sanitzed, the FDA’s report said. The equipment had been previously used to process raw potatoes, officials said, which could have left listeria bacteria behind.

In addition, a truck used to haul culled cantaloupe to a cattle operation was parked near the facility and could have introduced contamination to the facility, investigators said. Low levels of listeria in the field also could have introduced the bacteria into the packing facility. And the design of the plant allowed stagnant water to pool on the floor. The FDA had not inspected the farm before the Sept. 10 session that first detected listeria problems…

The outbreak has claimed lives in a dozen states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. They include six in Colorado, five in New Mexico, two each in Kansas, Louisiana, New York and Texas and one each in Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Wyoming…

Four illnesses were related to pregnancy, including a newborn who fell ill. One miscarriage has been reported.

Rest assured our elected officials are on top of the situation. Between Congress, the White House, the bureaucrats within the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture — the company has been mailed a warning letter detailing violations.

WTF?

 
“Every successful movement has a soundtrack,” the songwriter Tom Morello told reporters after he had tried to fire up the crowd at the Occupy Wall Street Protest last week with a Woody Guthrie tune and one of his own labor songs.

Perhaps he is right, but the protesters in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan have yet to find an anthem. Nor is the rest of the country humming songs about hard times. So far, musicians living through the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression have filled the airwaves with songs about dancing, not the worries of working people.

Where have all the protest songs gone?

To be sure, a handful of songwriters are tackling the issue. Ry Cooder, the blues and rock guitarist known for his exploration of roots music, lambastes bankers and conservatives in his latest album, “Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down” (Nonesuch). Similarly, Mr. Morello, who began his career as the guitarist and chief ideologue for the band Rage Against the Machine, makes an unapologetic call for leftist revolution in his new album, “World Wide Rebel Songs” (New West Records)…

Yet none of these songs have been big hits, and none are likely to have the impact that a song like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” had in the early 1960s.

The scarcity of songs about the economic disaster stands in contrast to the flurry of pop songs in the mid-2000s blaming President George W. Bush’s foreign policy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Antiwar songs came not only from stalwarts like R.E.M. and Neil Young but also from younger performers like Green Day, Bright Eyes and Pink…

“A Darth Vader-like president makes a great target,” Mr. Morello said. “One of the reasons the air has gone out of the balloon of protest songwriting is people hung their hopes on the Obama administration…”

The lack of a coherent message on the left has been evident at the Wall Street protest. “I have not heard a single song that sums up what we are trying to do here,” said Martían Hughes, a 24-year-old college student, after Mr. Morello’s performance. “Nor have I heard a single message.”

A couple of instant reactions to the article:

I’m afraid many of those sustained by the vague, generalized ennui and discomfort that sings about Occupying Wall Street – have parents who work down the street in one of the brokerage houses or are busy back home in Indiana selling life insurance. The occupiers will be around for what seems like a long time to TV talking heads. But, geeks who write games and sociology majors in Boston will find jobs – and vanish – before laid-off teachers do in Wisconsin.

A cache of Los Angeles Police Department submachine guns and handguns was stolen last week from a secured building used by the department’s SWAT unit, raising fears that the weapons, which police had altered to fire only blanks, could be converted back to lethal use, police officials confirmed…

Members of the SWAT unit, which specializes in hostage rescues and other high-risk situations, were scheduled to train at the facility Thursday, Downing said. A police officer arriving at the building around 9 a.m. Thursday discovered the weapons were missing, according to Downing. The officer also found electrical equipment stacked near a back door, indicating the burglars may still have been working and fled when the officer arrived.

Downing said the building, although not a guarded LAPD facility, was considered secure. To get to the weapons, the thieves cut through bolt locks on an outside door and two internal doors and forced their way through a metal roll gate, he said.

“I guess ‘secure’ is all relative now,” he said. “It’s embarrassing…. It’s a lesson learned…”

The building, which once housed textile companies, was donated to the department. Inside, the department put up walls and made other changes in order to create realistic scenarios for training exercises. They did not install an alarm system or surveillance cameras…

The obvious concern is that whoever stole the weapons will convert them from firing blanks to using live ammunition. Downing acknowledged that was “definitely a possibility” but said that to do so would require an understanding of the inner workings of the weapons.

Gun experts and online tutorials suggest, however, that the process is relatively simple and requires only a few parts. The company that manufactures the conversion kits used by the LAPD has an instructional video on its website that walks a viewer through the steps of returning an MP-5 to its original form in about five minutes.

Har. There’s a certain level of being “important” which conveys to some a conviction that they are untouchable. Who would dare to challenge their superior status not only in the community at large; but, among police officers.

So, you get careless.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Sacked Olympus chief executive Michael Woodford says he has contacted the UK’s Serious Fraud Office about the Japanese firm’s accounting practices.

Mr Woodford, who was dismissed last week, told the BBC that he believed the camera-maker had paid out excessive sums in relation to takeover deals. He says he was fired for raising the issue, but Olympus says his different management style was to blame.

The SFO confirmed that Mr Woodford had contacted it.

Olympus said it would “consider” taking legal action against Mr Woodford for disclosing confidential information.

Mr Woodford said he had commissioned auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers to look into an alleged $687 million payment by Olympus to a Cayman Island company. He told the BBC that he was ousted after he distributed a copy of the PwC report on Wednesday night…

He says he was called into a board meeting on Friday at which the agenda had been changed. The only new item to discuss was his dismissal as chief executive with immediate effect, for which, he said, no reason was given.

After the board voted for his dismissal, he left the meeting and was followed to his office by a colleague…He was asked for the key to his flat, 51% of which he owned, and was told to get the bus to the airport as they had taken away his car…

According to Mr Woodford, auditors were unable to establish who owned the company in the Cayman Islands. He said questions still had to be answered: “To whom and for what did we pay this money..?”

A perfectly legitimate question within any legal corporate structure. Whether that structure is manipulated by officers dedicated to criminal pursuits is an entirely relevant question.

Sounds like Mr. Woodford asked that question. His dismissal is the only answer, so far.

A favored spot near Harare

Three Zimbabwean women have been accused of a series of sex attacks on male hitchhikers, purportedly to steal their semen for use in ritual practices. In a case that has gripped media and public imagination, the gang appeared in court to face charges of aggravated indecent assault.

Sophie and Netsai Nhokwara, sisters aged 26 and 24, along with 28-year-old Rosemary Chakwizira, are the first suspects to be arrest since accounts of women gang-raping men in Zimbabwe emerged two years ago. They were charged along with Thulani Ngwenya, 24, who is Sophie Nhokwara’s boyfriend.

The gang’s alleged 17 victims identified so far include a soldier and a police officer whom they allegedly forced to have sex without condoms, the Herald newspaper reported…

The women were arrested when they were involved in an accident and police reportedly found 31 used condoms – three half-full of semen – in the boot of their car.

James Sabau, a spokesman for Harare police, told state media that preliminary investigations suggested a ritual link to the collection of victims’ semen.

“We are still trying to figure out why semen was collected,” he was quoted as saying. “Information we have gathered so far links the entire female rapist issue to rituals that make people rich. It is, however, still unclear how the supposed rituals work.”

RTFA. Honestly – I haven’t a comment for this one. What do you think?