AmericanIdle DaBoyZ gone Idle

Three men are arrested in connection with the theft of the corpse of Cyprus's ex-President Papadopoulos, officials say.

A former head of MI5 says she did not know US intelligence services were mistreating terror suspects until after she retired.

Fraudsters are continuing their switch from traditional card fraud to raiding online bank accounts, new research shows.

A SALE ON tools and home improvement gear.

A US woman from Pennsylvania faces charges of using the internet to recruit female militant fighters for deadly attacks abroad.

gollum123 sends an excerpt from the NY Times on how Google has taken a lead in language translation, in one of the company's few unqualified successes as it attempts to broaden is offerings beyond search. "...Google's quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. The network of data centers that it built for Web searches may now be, when lashed together, the world's largest computer. Google is using that machine to push the limits on translation technology. Last month, for example, it said it was working to combine its translation tool with image analysis, allowing a person to, say, take a cellphone photo of a menu in German and get an instant English translation. ...in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts. It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google's alley. ...Google's service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FAMILIAR TROPES: Matt Lauer picks, chooses “consensus.”

REPORT: Nissan has 56,000 pre-orders for all-electric Leaf. But are they real pre-orders, or just expressions of interest?

The victims of Sunday's sectarian massacres were buried in mass graves in central Nigeria on Monday as survivors told horrific stories of Christian villagers being trapped in nets and hacked to death by Muslim herdsmen. Reports on the death toll differed wildly, with some placing it at about 200 and others reporting 528 killed and thousands injured. "It was an ambush," said human rights lawyer Shehu Sani. "The attackers killed whoever they caught. It was mostly women who stayed behind to defend their children that became most of the victims."

THE OTHER DICK DROPS: Reader “Ben H.” suggested Wonkette liveblog Eric Massa’s appearance on Glenn Beck this afternoon. Wonkette, however, is not capable of watching the Glenn Beck Show under any circumstances. This is unfortunate because: “Representative Eric J. Massa, who resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, vehemently denied any wrongdoing during a television appearance late on Tuesday even as he described having tickle fights with staffers in a house they shared. But he insisted that was as far as it went.” HAHAHAHAHAH. Tickle fights are actually gayer than anal sex, is the thing. [NYT]

Glenn Beck - Eric Massa - United States Congress - Politics - United States

NANOTECHNOLOGY VS. CANCER: “For a long time nanotechnology was one of those technologies that lay only in our future. It is starting to show up in our present. Cornell researchers have attached antibodies to nanoparticles to attack colorectal cancer cells.”

USING ONLINE DATING to ask out people you already know?

NO, IT’S NOT ABOUT RAHM EMANUEL: Creative Capos.

blozza2070 notes the news that Jeff Jaffe has been appointed CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. Until January Jaffe was CTO at Novell and, while his name hasn't come up very often in this community, he is one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. A reading of Jaffe's blog while at Novell tends to paint him as a software patent supporter, Microsoft apologist, and no fan of the FSF. This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ANDREW MORRISS is debating Van Jones on “Green Jobs” over at The Economist. (Bumped).

UPDATE: Related: Looking at the White House emails.

Last week, the Washington Post published a front-page photo of two (gay?) men kissing in the courthouse’s “gay marriage line.” Many readers were furious. Today, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander determines once and for all whether this gay kiss ever even happened.

No, something else. He is determining once and for all… something else. Was it inappropriate for the Post to display this news photo of hot man-on-man sexy kiss time so prominently in its print newspaper, which America’s seniors read in the privacy of their own homes?

A few of the readers have engaged in rants, often with anti-gay slurs. One called me to complain about “promoting a faggot lifestyle.” Another complained about the photo in an e-mail to the two Post reporters who wrote Thursday’s story about the licenses: “That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women.”

But most simply said The Post had offended their sensibilities by publishing the photo, especially on the front page.

[...]

Wrote Lee Miller of Columbia: “I would appreciate it if your cover pictures would not be so disturbing where my kids can see it easily on the kitchen table… please don’t shove this “Gay” business in our face. This is something that should have shown up on an inside page or two (without the picture).”

In comments to the ombudsman’s call-in line (202.334.7582), one reader said, “the picture of two guys kissing makes me cringe.” Another called it “ridiculous,” adding: “Put it on page 10 or page four, put it in the paper, but I do not like it right there where I can’t avoid looking at it.”

Summary:

– No fucking gay faggots should be on the front page, stupid fucking faggots. Real faggots marry women.

– “Gay business” should not be shoved down my kids’ throats.

– Show the photo on an inside page and don’t show the photo.

– Don’t put the photo on the front page, because then people can’t help but stare at it constantly, amirite? (Thank you, caller got-no-pants.)

Ombudsman Andrew Alexander, however, insults all of these folks in his final paragraph:

There was a time, after court-ordered integration, when readers complained about front-page photos of blacks mixing with whites. Today, photo images of same-sex couples capture the same reality of societal change.

Ha ha, who says these same complainers ever accepted the black/white photographs? ASK ‘EM ABOUT THOSE, IN 2010.

Readers react to photo of two men kissing [WP/Omblog]

Washington Post - United States - Same-sex marriage - Washington DC - Gay

A Nigerian governor accuses the army of ignoring warnings of attacks, as communal tension remains high near Jos.

Brussels says it hopes European aerospace group EADS was not prevented from fairly bidding for a major US defence deal.

DFW NORML: A Tyler, Texas, man named Henry Walter Wooten was caught by law enforcement toking on a joint within 1000 feet of a day care center and carrying baggies of weed in his pockets. He was sentenced Thursday to 35 years in prison.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon pays an emotional tribute at a memorial service to the 101 UN staff who died in the Haiti earthquake.