Popular Eurovision website hacked in response to ‘parade of homosexuals’

A group is reportedly targeting websites related to the Eurovision Song Contest in Azerbaijan in protest at a ‘parade of homosexuals’ it believes will take place at the event. The independent Escotoday website, which publishes news about the Eurovision Song Contest, was believed to have been taken down by a denial-of-service attack today.

In April, the official Eurovision website experienced a similar attack. Escotoday’s website currently redirects to their Facebook page, where a statement says: “ESCTODAY WAS HACKED, in a second thousands of hours of hard work (actually 12 years) were erased as retaliation because we support the Eurovision Song Contest, a ”gay pride” as the hacker(s) call it. We will not be stopped!!! WE WILL BE BACK.”

According to Eurovision-interest site Esckaz.com, a group calling itself “The Devotees of Azerbaijan” was taking responsiblity. It said: “Ignoring its people’s honor and morals, Azerbaijan’s ruling regime is trying to spread ungodly (sinful) thoughts, and plans to arrange a parade of the homosexuals before the eurovision sound contest 2012. [sic]

PinkNews

Too Hot for TED: Income Inequality

If you’re plugged into the Internet, chances are you’ve seen a TED talk – the wonky, provocative web videos that have become a sort of nerd franchise. TED.com is where you go to find Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explaining why the world has too few female leaders, or Twitter cofounder Evan Williams sharing the secret power of listening to users to drive company improvement. The slogan of the nonprofit group behind the site is “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

There’s one idea, though, that TED’s organizers recently decided was too controversial to spread: the notion that widening income inequality is a bad thing for America, and that as a result, the rich should pay more in taxes.

TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”

The Speech That's Too Hot for TED - The Slides That Are Too Hot for TED

NationalJournal.com - TED.com

Kodak had a nuclear reactor in cellar

For more than 30 years, Kodak Park was home to a little-known underground labyrinth containing a small nuclear research reactor, one of the few of its kind in the world. It wasn’t a power plant, and carried no risk of explosion. Nothing ever leaked. Eastman Kodak Co. officials say the research device was perfectly safe.

Still, the reactor was locked down, remotely surveilled and tightly regulated — mainly because it contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched uranium. That’s the material that nuclear bombs are made of. Terrorists covet it.

When Kodak decided six years ago to close down the device, still more scrutiny followed. Federal regulators made them submit detailed plans for removing the substance. When the highly enriched uranium was packaged into protective containers and spirited away in November 2007, armed guards were surely on hand.

Did you know? Kodak Park had a nuclear reactor | Democrat and Chronicle | democratandchronicle.com

Europe

European borders trough the ages.

A Message To You Rudy

Amy Winehouse Live In Madrid (2008)

Beekeepers Win Ban on Monsanto's GMOs in Poland

Monsanto's Mon810 corn, genetically engineered to produce a mutant version of the insecticide Bt, has been banned in Poland following protests by beekeepers who showed the corn was killing honeybees.

Poland is the first country to formally acknowledge the link between Monsanto's genetically engineered corn and the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that's been devastating bees around the world. Many analysts believe that Monsanto has known the danger their GMOs posed to bees all along.

Causes.com

Zimbabwe's latest way to stop HIV: Force women to have fewer baths and shave off their hair to make them less attractive

A Zimbabwean politician has said women should be forced to bathe less and shave off their hair to make them less attractive to men and help curb the spread of HIV.

Senator Morgan Femai reportedly told a conference he believed the killer disease had spread because men found it difficult to resist attractive and well-dressed women.

The politician added that new laws should be drawn up compelling women to make themselves less attractive to save men from themselves, according to a report on the New Zimbabwe website.

Mail Online

Queen's cousin given £320,000 by controversial Russian oligarch

The Queen’s cousin Prince Michael of Kent has been secretly receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds from Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Dozens of payments worth at least £320,000 from the exiled tycoon  were channelled through offshore companies.

Prince Michael is already known for accepting charity from the Queen who started paying the rent at Kensington Palace when MPs wanted to evict him and Princess Michael of Kent. But now the royal, dubbed the ‘pauper prince’, faces questions about whether he has offered anything in return for the billionaire Russian’s money.

His spokesman yesterday said ‘absolutely not’, adding: ‘Mr Berezovsky has known the prince since the early 1990s and has a high regard for the prince’s work. He therefore chose to be supportive over a period which ended some years ago.’A friend of the oligarch suggested he simply wanted to be a part of high society, and his friendship with Prince Michael gave him coveted access.

Mr Berezovsky was a key figure in the Kremlin before falling out with Vladimir Putin and seeking asylum in Britain 12 years ago. He became friends with Prince Michael – a distant cousin of the last tsar, Nicholas II – and the pair have frequently dined together at Kensington Palace.

Mail Online

The freemasons lodge of which Prince Michael of Kent is Grand Master is being sued in the High Court over a £673,000 bill. 

Princess Pushy: The Fabulous Life of Princess Michael of Kent on Scandalous Woman

She's lost control

Joy Division

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon

Bush and Associates Found Guilty of Torture

Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) - The five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered a guilty verdict against former United States President George W. Bush and his associates at the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal hearing that had started on Monday.
On the charge of Crime of Torture and War Crimes, the tribunal finds the accused persons former U.S. President George W. Bush and his associates namely Richard Cheney, former U.S. Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defence Secretary, Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush, David Addington, then General Counsel to the Vice-President, William Haynes II, then General Counsel to Secretary of Defence, Jay Bybee, then Assistant Attorney General, and John Choon Yoo, former Deputy Assistant Attorney-General guilty as charged and convicted as war criminals for Torture and Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment of the Complainant War Crime Victims.

Earlier in the week, the tribunal heard the testimonies of three witnesses namely Abbas Abid, Moazzam Begg and Jameelah Hameedi. They related the horrific tortures they had faced during their incarceration. The tribunal also heard two other Statutory Declarations of Iraqi citizen Ali Shalal and Rhuhel Ahmed, a British citizen.
The witnesses were taken prisoners and held in prisons in Afghanistan (Bagram), in Iraq (Abu Gharib, Baghdad International Airport) and two of them namely Moazzam Begg and Rhuhel Ahmed were transported to Guantanamo Bay.

uruknet.info

The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths

Were Moses and Akhenaten the Same Person?

Akhenaten is the most mysterious and interesting of all the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He created a revolution in religion, philosophy, and art that resulted in the introduction of the first monotheistic form of worship known in history. Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was the first to suggest a connection between Moses and Akhenaten.

In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, Freud argued that the biblical Moses was an official in the court of Akhenaten, and an adherent of the Aten religion. After the death of Akhenaten, Freud's theory goes, Moses selected the Israelite tribe living east of the Nile Delta to be his chosen people, took them out of Egypt at the time of the Exodus, and passed on to them the tenets of Akhenaten's religion. When modern archaeologists came across the strangely-drawn figure of Akhenaten in the ruins of Tell el-Amarna in the middle of the 19th century, they were not sure what to make of him. Some thought he was a woman disguised as a king. By the early years of the 20th century when the city of Amarna had been excavated and more became known about him and his family, Akhenaten became a focus of interest for Egyptologists, who saw him as a visionary humanitarian as well as the first monotheist.

Before It's News

Court Upholds Google-NSA Relationship Secrecy

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the National Security Agency’s decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption and cybersecurity.

That’s despite the fact that Google itself admitted it turned to “U.S. authorities,” which obviously includes the NSA, after the search giant’s Chinese operation was deeply hacked. Former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoking the Freedom of Information Act, had sought such documents following the January 2010 cyberattack on Google that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was among the considerations that prompted Google to consider abandoning China, and Google announced that it was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.” The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post followed up, saying Google had contacted the NSA following the attack.

EPIC sought documents seeking to know what type of collaboration there was between Google and the NSA and, among other things, records of communication between the NSA and Google concerning Google’s e-mail service Gmail. In response, the NSA invoked a so-called “Glomar” response, in which the agency neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on the topic at all. EPIC sued and lost in the lower courts.

On appeal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the NSA’s conclusion that admitting the existence of relevant documents would harm national security (.pdf).

More on Wired.com

The History of Government Sponsored Terror

Infowars.com - PrisonPlanet

James Brown & The Famous Flames

James Brown & The Famous Flames 1964

Mapping Stereotypes

If you missed geography class in school here some maps to understand how the world looks!

Mapping Stereotypes by Alphadesigner on Avax - alphadesigner.com

Romney is a Bully

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has apologised after a newspaper reported that he had been among a group of students who bullied a classmate they presumed was gay.

"I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended... obviously, I apologise," the 65-year-old said. Mr Romney was responding to a Washington Post story that described an incident in 1965 in which the former Massachusetts Governor apparently pinned down a fellow student and attempted to cut his bleached-blonde hair.

According to former classmates named in the article, Romney apparently led the attack against student John Lauber, who was "perpetually teased for his non-conformity and presumed homosexuality".

Sky News

Swiss Politician Allegedly Offered Friend's Wife and Daughter To Cannibals

Hans Ulrich Rudel, a Swiss politician and convicted murderer, is now accused of putting out an ad to attract potential cannibals interested in eating his pal's wife and 12-year-old daughter. The Local reports that Rudel, who co-founded the Embrachertal branch of the Conservative Party, is accused of putting the ad out in 2010 in an effort to get his friend's wife "out of the way" during an ugly divorce.

The ad said the mother and daughter were "keen to meet gentlemen interested in slaughter and dolce who would like to roast us on a spit." "Dolce," as Rudel allegedly told police, was his word for cannibalism.

The Daily Mail reports that Rudel received dozens of responses to the ad, but the person he replied to turned out to be an undercover cop. "There are a lot of cannibals out there," he said before being sentenced, according to the Mail.

Huffington Post

China vows to defend island claim

A Chinese military newspaper has warned that the country's armed forces will not allow anyone to challenge China's sovereignty of a tiny island outcrop in the South China Sea. China and the Philippines have been involved in a tense standoff since April 10 when the Philippines Navy accused Chinese boats of fishing illegally in waters off the Scarborough Shoal, some 130 miles (200 kilometers) from the Philippines island of Luzon.

They attempted to arrest the crew but were blocked by Chinese surveillance vessels deployed in the area. Both countries claim the shoal, which China calls Huangyan Island. Analysts believe the area is rich in mineral resources, natural gas and oil.

CNN.com - Xinhua Insight: True story behind Huangyan Island dispute in South China Sea

This Charming Video Game

The Smiths - This Charming Man / Lana Del Rey - Video Games
Mashup & video by The Reborn Identity

To Serve and Protect

'Underwear bomber' was working for the CIA

Would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged.

The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.

The plot, which the White House said on Monday had involved the seizing of an underwear bomb by authorities in the Middle East sometime in the last 10 days, had caused alarm throughout the US.

The Guardian

American Police Beating Mentally Ill Homeless Man To Death

Never-before-seen surveillance footage of the beating of Kelly Thomas, a Fullerton, Calif. homeless man with schizophrenia, was revealed Monday during a hearing to determine if the police officers involved in the altercation that led to his death will face trial.

The 33-minute video starts with Thomas being approached by Fullerton Police Department Officer Manuel Ramos, who engages him in conversation. By minute 15, Ramos has already donned latex gloves.  "You see my fists?" Ramos asks Thomas. "They're getting ready to fuck you up."

"Start punching, dude!" responds Thomas, who was sitting on the ground. When Thomas stands up to walk away, a second police officer hits him repeatedly with a baton. The first few minutes of the altercation are off-screen, but the audio shows Thomas verbally giving up.

"I'm sorry, dude! I'm sorry," Thomas said. But the blows continue. At minute 16:30, the trio comes back into focus, and both police officers are on top of Thomas. "I can't breathe dude, I can't breathe!" protests Thomas. "Please, I can't breathe!" Throughout, officers keep telling him to put his hands behind his back.

At minute 18, a back-up police car arrives at the scene and at least one more officer joins in. This is when the tasering starts, amid police requests to "stop resisting." After more prolonged tasers, Thomas is wailing and multiple officers are piled on top of him. At minute 20, Thomas cries out to his father, who isn't there: "Dad! Dad! Dad! Help me, help me Dad!"

The video ends with emergency responders removing Thomas from the scene.

Huffington Post

Ziggy Stardust

David Bowie (live 1972)