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"nearly 20" kids beat man to brain death with bats, shovels and boards Brutal stuff. One of the kids in custody is only 10 years old. The victim had "confronted them for throwing an egg at him and punched one teen in the mouth". They went and organized a mob, and returned, according to the Milwaukee Police. What do you do with a 10 year old murderer, anyway?
posted by BarneyFifesBullet at 10:33 PM PST - 42 comments

There's a reason why you've been getting those 'RapeMaster' spam ads although we're not sure why, but alot of weird stuff is popping up in spam. I could live without ads for 'farmer girl on cow' sites.

To heck with thinking this out, it's obviously a massive conspiracy involving the Government, Government Ops, Ariel Sharon, the CIA, the Queen of England, Mothers who post bikini pics for pedophiles, Wired.com, Capitol Hill Blue and other forms of media to discredit the Internet while using the Internet to do it.

Anyways, what sorts of weird 'GovOps' spam are you getting in your mailboxes?
posted by RobbieFal at 9:27 PM PST - 10 comments

EBay in patent dispute. EBay is currently involved in a patent dispute with someone who claims to have patented the idea of online auctions in 1995. EBay believes it has found prior art in a USENET post from 1994.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 9:16 PM PST - 7 comments

EU officially excludes Americans from war crimes tribunal. "Defusing a trans-Atlantic spat, the European Union agreed Monday to spare U.S. citizens the fate of standing trial on war crimes charges in the newly created International Criminal Court."
posted by botono9 at 9:07 PM PST - 45 comments

Oh No - Not the O-Zone Layer AGAIN! It seems that our wonderful ozone hole over the Earth has split in two... Now you don't need to wear 100 sunblock just on Australia and Antarctica. But scientists *sound* a little happier, or perhaps I'm just reading into it a little too much.
posted by djspicerack at 8:33 PM PST - 4 comments

What lies beneath. Confirming what you probably already knew, "as we juggle eating, drinking and working at our work stations, the tight shadowy crevices between our keyboard become the computer equivalent of a black hole, sucking in pizza toppings, contact lenses, paper clips, the odd insect...". Germ freakery or a genuine hygiene concern?
posted by netsirk at 7:29 PM PST - 43 comments

The Rise of the Ideopolis "Democrats have been gaining strength in areas where the production of ideas and services has either redefined or replaced an economy dependent on manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction. Many of these areas are in the North and West, but they are also in states like Florida and Virginia. Republicans are strongest in areas where the transition to postindustrial society has lagged. Many of these are in the Deep South and Prairie States. As Democratic politics has evolved over the last decade, it has increasingly reflected the socially liberal, fiscally moderate priorities of these new areas -- what we call a politics of progressive centrism. Republicans have continued to espouse an anti-government credo closely identified with business and the religious right -- a politics that plays well in parts of the Deep South but not in a new postindustrial America." (Check out what's going on in Illinois). If that doesn't work, there's always the NASCAR Democrats.
posted by owillis at 7:13 PM PST - 15 comments

Geeky obsessiveness on a level that I can definitely get behind. A shot by shot analysis of the full trailer for "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers". The trailer is up in Quicktime here, for all us fanboys.
posted by GriffX at 6:32 PM PST - 19 comments

If you can spare a moment from histrionic rhetorical arguments about far away places you have no real experience with to involve yourself with practical ways to stop the trend toward a fundamentalist totalitarian corporate dictatorship in this country and step by small pragmatic step reclaim democracy, a good first step is to support Oregon's Measure 23, to promote comprehensive universal health care using a single payer public finance mechanism, or support healthcare for everyone in your state.
posted by semmi at 6:30 PM PST - 37 comments

Music compact disc distributors, retailers settle price fixing suit. But they're still busting our chops for downloading MP3s. This is ammo to Kazaa or WinMX the SOBs into submission, I say. What share of this cash will actually benefit consumers? By the way, part of the press release at the AG's site may be cut off. It's the bottom of the first page: Today’s settlement has three major components: 1. Sales Practice Changes. Defendants have agreed to an injunction preventing them from forcing retailers to increase CD prices and encouraging price competition between them.
posted by stevefromsparks at 6:18 PM PST - 7 comments

One sunny day, Bill Beaty was walking through a car park when he noticed a black car that appeared to have a series of interesting spots and highlights on its hood. On closer inspection, he also noticed several hand prints which had a curious property: they didn't appear to be on the surface of the paintwork at all but instead looked as though they were floating several inches below the surface. In some cases they even looked like they were floating above the surface. After thinking about this he came to realize that he looking at a kind of holographic effect but this kind of hologram didn't require all the usual paraphernalia nor was it caused by light wave interference. It was a kind of holography that could be used to draw pictures in 3D by hand. (More inside...)
posted by lagado at 6:10 PM PST - 10 comments

Bill O'Reilly's views on American protection of Israel, and the response of the Muslim World.
posted by yevge at 6:08 PM PST - 27 comments

Pakistani man denies having sex with Taliban American. Not that there's anything wrong with it.
posted by msacheson at 5:44 PM PST - 19 comments

"They were acting like bin Laden was hiding behind every door. That just wasn’t the way to be acting with civilians." According to this Newsweek article, some members of U.S. Special Forces seem to think the military's recent operations to track down Al Qaeda went a bit awry.
posted by moonbiter at 5:18 PM PST - 13 comments

Cicero, writing in the first century BC, mentions an instrument “recently constructed by our friend Poseidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets.” Archimedes is also said to have made a small planetarium, and two such devices were said to have been rescued from Syracuse when it fell in 212BC. This reconstruction suggests such references can now be taken literally.
posted by grumblebee at 4:43 PM PST - 9 comments

Need some office equipment? Maybe you'll want to check out the 8863 items from Arthur Andersen being auctioned off, starting tomorrow. Lots of printers, monitors, servers, apparently not much cable management, but no shredders that I've seen yet. Then again, I haven't looked through the 6 meg Excel spreadsheet of all items either. Just the ticket, in case you need 18 floors(600,000 square feet) worth of furniture and equipment. A cold, hard footnote to a pathetic and shameful story of integrity squandered.
posted by dglynn at 2:55 PM PST - 16 comments

U.S. helped Iraq start bioweapons program

"I don't think it would be accurate to say the United States government deliberately provided seed stocks to the Iraqis' biological weapons programs,'' said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. biological weapons inspector. "But they did deliver samples that Iraq said had a legitimate public health purpose, which I think was naive to believe, even at the time."

" -isn't iraq just another case of blowback and is anyone asking what the next round of "blowback" will be if we go in again?
posted by specialk420 at 2:46 PM PST - 35 comments

Is the US targeting al-Jazeera? In defense of al-Jazeera, they have interviewed Israeli officials and members of the Bush administration. They have also been critical of Arab dictatorships. In October of last year, Colin Powell tried to gag Al-Jazeera. Al-Jazeera's response? They did a story on the attempted censorship. Six weeks later, the al-Jazeera office in Kabul was demolished by a pair of 500 lb. bombs. Sami al-Haj, a cameraman for al-Jazeera, has been illegally imprisoned without charges by the US for nine months. His wife -- the mother of Sami's three-year old son -- assumed that he had been killed until she received a letter from him in April. Can we really say that their approach to journalism is biased and disrepectful, but ours is not?
posted by insomnia_lj at 2:18 PM PST - 14 comments

Student arrested with boxcutter & scissors. But the thing that really boggled my mind was this: "Since February, we've taken more than 25,000 boxcutters from carry-ons and off of passengers. We've taken more than 500 firearms and 215,000 knives," Johnson said." For one thing, I guess I had never realized how much box cutting went on in the US - but the bizarre piece is the guns. A half dozen I can see, but five freakin' hundred? How can that many people - in the post 9/11 world - still be trying to get serious weapony onto airplanes?
posted by MidasMulligan at 1:33 PM PST - 45 comments

Torricelli Considers Dropping Out Of His Re-Election Bid ...and Republicans' hopes to reclaim the Senate brighten. Why drop out now, with only 5 weeks left? Is Torricelli guilty of even more ethics violations than previously thought? (more inside...)
posted by jennak at 12:18 PM PST - 67 comments

Testimony of Teens Kidnapped w/ authorization of parents and taken to overseas "behavior modification" schools. After researching these schools almost 5 years ago I am horrified that most of them are still running and whose teachings are even showing up in the form of seminars in kindergarten. Has anyone else had experience with schools like this, whether directly or through a family member or friend ?
posted by bkdelong at 11:44 AM PST - 17 comments

American Dreams premierd last night on NBC. "This evocative drama -- set against the memorable, upbeat sounds of the 1960s -- depicts a more innocent America as seen through the youthful Pryor family of Philadelphia as they brace for cultural turbulence ahead that still resonates in this contemporary era." Several things along those lines in the show caught my attention. One being the way the 1960's mother role is portrayed. Is she content or is she oppressed? What happend to the everyday sit-down family dinner, where some things are not appropriate to say at the dinner table? Why did it seem like such a simpler place and time? Would America today feel the same pain if we lost our president? The show is not a whole lot different from the concept of the Wonder Years but it seems fresh compared to some of the other NBC dramas.
posted by Recockulous at 11:06 AM PST - 53 comments

BobCrane.com is a pay-pr0n site (don't worry; the first page, at least, is work-safe) that collects the explicit photos, films, etc. that "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane took of himself and a ceaseless stream of female companions in his off-hours. What makes the site unusual is that it's run by Bob's son, Scotty, who takes particular pride in defending his dad's sexual prowess and mental health. This defense is necessary because Crane is being biopic'd in a new film by Paul Schrader which, according to a recent NYT article, imagines Crane as the archetypal sex addict, culminating in a still-unsolved murder. [reg. req'd: metafilter41, metafilter; much more inside.]
posted by blueshammer at 10:37 AM PST - 16 comments

RAPGEN Between the photo shoots, trips to the orthodontist for work on your platinum grill, and keeping your hos in check, you don't have time to sit down and compose songs. It's rare that you even have time to kick back with a 40. Producing with RAPGEN ensures that you'll always be keeping it real.
posted by adamms222 at 10:33 AM PST - 8 comments

The following is a [partial] list of the most frequently challenged books of 2001...
1. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
3. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier (the "Most Challenged" fiction book of 1998)
4. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
5. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
(Last week was Banned Books Week. Sorry this is late. Did you remember to hug your favorite banned book? Does anyone really think children need to be "protected" from these books?)
posted by Shane at 10:22 AM PST - 52 comments

Freedomland was an entertainment park, the largest anywhere in the world. It was New York's answer to Disneyland. Built in the shape of the United States, this 205-acre park's main theme was American history. It was divided into seven sections of our country, each with its own special exhibit or disaster. You could travel from the East Coast to the West Coast, all in one day. It only lasted frm 1960 till 1964 and considered one of the greatest failures in amusement park history.
posted by atom128 at 10:03 AM PST - 11 comments

American Heritage magazine's fifth annual Overrated and Underrated list is out, with this year's experts weighing in on the most overblown poet, underappreciated pirate, and overadmired Roosevelt, among many others. (See the Metafilter discussion of last year's list for more dichotomies.)
posted by arco at 9:32 AM PST - 17 comments

Myth Dispelled: Shoe Size, Penis Size Not Linked. I guess there's no need in buying my shoes two sizes too large any longer (pardon the pun). Damn you scientists!
posted by pallid at 9:18 AM PST - 22 comments

Are you writing a novel? An article in the NY Times urging would-be authors to pack it in. Given the quoted stat (that 81% of Americans 'feel they have a book in them'), and extrapolating it for the rest of the world, that still means that there are roughly 12,887 unwritten books out there in me-fi land. Is this true? And has anyone actually written theirs down?
posted by jonathanbell at 9:16 AM PST - 59 comments

David Hasselhoff notifies media that he's hit rock bottom. "I am *too* a tortured artist. See?"
posted by spotmeter at 9:07 AM PST - 30 comments

Theologian of the Year: Ms. Buffy. "We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it's hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion."
posted by jacknose at 9:05 AM PST - 13 comments

The Demon in the Freezer An article by the author of The Hot Zone. " The water contained the whole molecules of life from variola, a parasite that had colonized us thousands of years ago. We had almost freed ourselves of it, but we found we had developed a strong affinity for smallpox. Some of us had made it into a weapon, and now we couldn't get rid of it. I wondered if we ever would, for the story of our entanglement with smallpox is not yet ended".
posted by Mack Twain at 1:57 AM PST - 10 comments