Friday News Bucket

14 Comments

1. 

   CabinGirl on March 23, 2007 at 6:35 am

   How’s this for fighting global warming? Guaradian

   Cut down on flying, sell the car and recycle your bottles. But if you really want to tackle global warming, you should stop your cow from burping.

   According to scientific estimates, the methane gas produced by cows is responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. And now, German scientists have invented a pill to cut bovine burping.

2. 

   CabinGirl on March 23, 2007 at 6:46 am

   Great story about a bartender and waitress nailing a would-be date rapist (okay, it probably wasn’t his first time doing this) and putting him in jail.

   He certainly was persistent with the serial drugging of his date’s beers, wasn;t he?

3. 

   on March 23, 2007 at 6:48 am

   Other things we can definintely do without.

   We can and we did survive just fine before cell phones.

   We can and we did survive just fine before TV.  Ya, I know 300 channels of pure propaganda, engineered society destroying memes and beyond retarded talking points.

   We can and we did survive just fine before the government chose to monitor the size, color and consistency of every American’s last bowel movement.

   We were once great until THEY decided the profit margins were not enough and THEY decided to ship goods around the world five times before they are made into useable products.

   Big Al, lied about NAFTA so therefore the CO2 causing global warming must also be a lie.

4. 

   michaelmt on March 23, 2007 at 7:14 am

   There is a sound body of research to prove that when people had 3 choices of news plus a paper, they read or watched and made judgments. Now, with too many choices, people simply gravitate to those that reconfirm their existing prejudices. So in fact, we get less “news” today than before.

5. 

   CabinGirl on March 23, 2007 at 8:13 am

   this means? BBC

   Fifteen British Navy personnel have been captured at gunpoint by Iranian forces, the Ministry of Defence says.

   The men were seized at 1030 local time when they boarded a boat in the Gulf, off the coast of Iraq, which they suspected was smuggling cars.

   The Royal Navy said it was doing everything it could to secure the release of the sailors and marines who are based on HMS Cornwall.

   They were said to be carrying out a routine patrol in Iraqi waters.

   Gulf map

   The Ministry of Defence said: “The group boarding party had completed a successful inspection of a merchant ship when they and their two boats were surrounded and escorted by Iranian vessels into Iranian territorial waters.

   • 

     rba on March 23, 2007 at 10:28 am

     It means the brits will make every effort to settle this diplomatically, and we should thank the gods it wasn’t a U.S. vessel.  The chickenhawks are hungry these days.

6. 

   CabinGirl on March 23, 2007 at 9:19 am

   and polls are beginning to reflect it: LA Times

   Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged since the second year of George W. Bush’s presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political dominance for more than a decade, a major new survey has found.

   The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press, found a “dramatic shift” in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, half of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, while only 35% aligned with Republicans.

   What’s more, the survey found the public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has edged down.

   Those findings suggest that Republicans’ political challenges reach beyond the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and Bush.

   Time to stop pursuing that rightward center, Dems.

7. 

   rba on March 23, 2007 at 10:31 am

   Amanda Bronstad/NLJ:  Law Firms Line Up to Represent Candidates.  

   “Fueling much of the legal work are increased FEC fines, more regulations following the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (the McCain-Feingold bill) and an expected record number of dollars that will be spent on the 2008 election.  ..  “You’ll have more work than a relatively small number of practitioners can handle,” said Robert Bauer, a partner at Seattle-based Perkins Coie who is general counsel to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. “The bar is definitely going to expand.”

   Follow the lawyers . . .

8. 

   michaelmt on March 23, 2007 at 10:52 am

   Watching the House debate today was refreshing. But what was the stupid comment about tropical fish?

   It was corrected–with ridicule–shortly after a Republican said it. I just wonder if it wasn’t a “talking point” provided to a bunch of people who (they believe) won’t read the bill anyway.

   • 

     CabinGirl on March 23, 2007 at 5:35 pm

     I missed the fish thing…who said it?

9. 

   Man Eegee on March 23, 2007 at 2:08 pm

   Hi CG!  Wondered where you’ve been.  Thought you might’ve been abducted

   Former Gov. Fife Symington says now that those strange lights that appeared over Phoenix a decade ago were from another world and that he had a close encounter with an alien craft on March 13, 1997.

   “I’m a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I’ve ever seen. It remains a great mystery. Other people saw it, responsible people,” Symington said Thursday. “I don’t know why people would ridicule it.”

   Symington, who was in his second term as governor of Arizona during the Phoenix Lights incident, recently told a UFO investigator making a documentary that he had kept quiet about his personal close encounter because he didn’t want to panic the populace.

   linkage (with priceless pic)

   • 

     CabinGirl on March 23, 2007 at 5:32 pm

     The aliens came in business suits, that’s why nobody knew
     perfect haircuts looking smooth, just like me and you
     they looked so much like they belonged, nobody looked their way
     The aliens came in business suits, business suits, business suits
     The aliens came in business suits
     it was a fateful day

     The aliens came in business suits, we thought they were our friends
     short haircuts, white shirts and ties, the women and the men
     they said “Business is our business”, that’s how they defined their ground
     The aliens came in business suits, business suits, business suits
     The aliens came in business suits
     and took no money down

     The aliens came in business suits they elected one of their own
     nobody voted for him but everybody took him home
     well, he did look good on camera, had a kind of handsome face
     The aliens came in business suits, business suits, business suits
     The aliens came in business suits
     and took every parking space

     The aliens came in business suits and they invented megatons
     they divided the whole world up in half and to each half they gave one
     and they said “You better watch yourselves or there’ll be nothing left but bugs”
     The aliens came in business suits, business suits, business suits
     The aliens came in business suits
     it was like some ugly drug

     The aliens came in business suits and they fooled us all the while
     they gave each of us an ID card and put our faces in a file
     well, they looked so much like they belonged, no one raised a fuss
     The aliens came in business suits, business suits, business suits
     The aliens came in business suits
     the aliens were us

10. 

    Man Eegee on March 23, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    An extremely rare species of tiny owl has been seen in the wild for the first time, the American Bird Conservancy said Thursday. The long-whiskered owlet, one of the world’s smallest owls, was discovered in 1976. Researchers have caught a few specimens in nets after dark but had not seen it in nature.

    It was spotted in the wild in February by researchers monitoring a private conservation area in Peru’s northern jungle.

    linkage (with pic)

11. 

    dada on March 23, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    must be a slow news day…

    Houdini to be exhumed…

    The family of the legendary escapologist Harry Houdini today announced plans to exhume his body in a bid to discover whether he was murdered.
    Houdini’s great nephew George Hardeen said the family wanted to determine whether he was poisoned by spiritualists in revenge for his debunking of their claims of contact with the dead.

    Rumours that the escape artist and magician was murdered have persisted ever since his death on Halloween 1926.

    […]

    A 2006 biography, The Secret Life of Houdini, renewed interest in the theory that he was poisoned by a group known as The Spiritualists, whose members included Arthur Conan Doyle.

    […]

    via The Guardian UK

    wonder if Geraldo Rivera is lurking in the background?

    Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.
    Sherlock Holmes