New York: High-End Madam Provided Underage Girls for Wealthy Clients at Upper East Side Brothel
March 7th, 2012According to the article, Gristina has been doing this for, “15 or so years.” The police always know about these brothels from the start, so, why bust her now?
My guess is that the DA’s office knows where she has stashed a decent chunk of change, and they want it.
Via: New York Daily News:
A high-end madam who boasted she used cops as security and made millions by peddling flesh — including underage girls — to rich and powerful clients has been busted after a five-year probe, prosecutors said.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office indicted petite, blond, green-eyed Anna Gristina, 44, in a corruption investigation that amassed 50 to 100 hours of audio and video recordings, some showing prostitutes doing the deed, according to court records.
“We have had at least one eyewitness account of someone that has been obviously present for a sexual encounter arranged by (Gristina) for one of her clients in which minors were involved in the encounter,” Assistant District Attorney Charles Linehan said at her Feb. 23 arraignment.
Prosecutors said they caught Gristina, a suburban mom with four children, boasting that she had collaborators in law enforcement who were willing to tip her off if investigators were closing in on her.
Head LulzSec Is an FBI Informant
March 7th, 2012Via: USA Today:
Five alleged hackers have been charged with breaking into the computer systems of governments, corporations and media organizations after the reputed head of the LulzSec ring became an FBI informant, authorities announced.
Research Credit: Noble
Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable
March 7th, 2012I’ve registered cryptogon.ch with the Swiss registrar Switchplus.
I don’t know how well .ch will hold up going forward, but it seemed prudent to at least have an alternative if I should lose control of the cryptogon.com domain for any reason. At a minimum, .ch appears to be far, far more desirable than the U.S. controlled top level domains, where arbitrary takedowns and DNS hijackings are now occurring.
…
I don’t anticipate any particular action against Cryptogon, but the fact is that it has already happened to some site operators. No due process. Arbitrary, fascist whims. That’s it. And if it can happen to _______ (fill in the blank) it can happen to me or you, or anyone who uses .com, .net or .org.
—From 2010, cryptogon.ch
Via: Wired:
When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.
EasyDNS, an internet infrastructure company, protested that the “ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc. needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of U.S. federal and state lawmakers.”
Research Credit: noncompliant
Eastern Libya Declares Semiautonomous Region
March 6th, 2012Via: AP:
Tribal leaders and militia commanders declared a semiautonomous region in oil-rich eastern Libya on Tuesday, a move opponents fear will be the first step toward outright dividing the country six months after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi.
Libya’s National Transitional Council, the interim central government based in the capital Tripoli, has repeatedly voiced its opposition to the creation of a partly autonomous eastern region, warning it could eventually lead to the breakup of the North African nation.
Thousands of representatives of major tribal leaders, militia commanders and politicians made the declaration in a ceremony held in the eastern city of Benghazi.
They vowed to end decades of marginalization under Gadhafi and named a council to run the affairs of the newly created region, extending from the central coastal city of Sirte to the Egyptian border in the east.
Thirteen French Officers Captured by Syrian Army [???]
March 6th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
Thirteen French officers have been captured by Syrian forces according to the Lebanon-based Daily Star newspaper, the first mainstream media outlet to report on rumours of Western troops on the ground.
The French foreign ministry dismissed the report, however, telling the Daily Telegraph that not a single French soldier is on Syrian soil.
But the defence ministry was less categorical, saying it neither confirmed nor denied the claim.
…
The report claiming that French officers are on the ground came from the Daily Star, a reputable newspaper in Beirut.
The Daily Star cites a Damascus-based Pro-Syrian Palestinian source as alleging that the French troops are being held in a field hospital in Homs.
The source claimed officials in Paris and Damascus are brokering a deal on what to do with the French nationals.
No explanation as to why the French troops had been in Syria was given nor was any indication as to whether they had been part of a larger contingent.
It was not possible to independently verify the claims.
Finding Your Book Interrupted… By the Tablet You Read It On
March 6th, 2012One of the most irritating experiences that I can think of is being interrupted as I’m trying to concentrate. When I sit down to read a book, I don’t want my focus shattered every few seconds or minutes by dazzling whizbangery. Apple, though, wants to turn reading into an experience akin to watching an episode of The Three Stooges. BONK! BANG! Slap! Nuck. Nuck. Nuck.
—Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs
Via: New York Times:
Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?
People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.
E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.
That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading.
“It’s like trying to cook when there are little children around,” said David Myers, 53, a systems administrator in Atlanta, who got a Kindle Fire tablet in December. “A child might do something silly and you’ve got to stop cooking and fix the problem and then return to cooking.”
“These apps beg you to review them all the time,” he said, but he remains a fan of the device.
For book publishers, who have already seen many consumers convert from print books to e-readers, the rise of tablets poses a potential danger: that book buyers may switch to tablets and then discover that they just aren’t very amenable to reading.
Holder: When It Comes to Assassinating Americans, Due Process Includes Arbitrary Whims of the Regime
March 6th, 2012Via: MSNBC:
The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be “deprived of life” without due process of law. But that due process, Holder said, doesn’t necessarily come from a court.
“Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process,” the attorney general said.
Holder said a U.S. citizen can legally be targeted in a foreign country if that person is “a senior leader of al-Qaida or associated forces,” and is actively involved in planning to kill Americans. Killing would be justified if the person poses an imminent threat of a violent attack against the U.S. and cannot easily be captured.
Any military operation targeting a citizen overseas must be carried out consistent with the law of war. “The principle of humanity requires us to use weapons that will not inflict unnecessary suffering,” he said.
The ACLU called Holder’s explanation “a defense of the government’s chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny.”
“Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
“Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power,” she said.
Russia Arrests Hundreds of Anti-Putin Protestors
March 6th, 2012Via: AFP:
Russian police on Monday broke up protests in Moscow and Saint Petersburg against Vladimir Putin’s victory in presidential polls, roughly arresting hundreds of people. Police moved in to disperse a protest at Pushkin Square in central Moscow, after hundreds of people refused to leave the venue at the end of a larger rally earlier.
The Museum of Government Waste
March 6th, 2012Maybe the filmmakers could get a B-2 bomber to park out front:
Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit
At $2 billion each in 1997 dollars ($2.8 billion each in 2012 dollars), however, they would have to significantly increase their fundraising efforts.
Via: Museum of Government Waste:
Filmed over the last 5 years, MUSEUM OF GOVERNMENT WASTE follows regular citizens Jim and Ellen Hubbard as they travel to Washington, DC in the ultimate quest to find out why the federal government is spending our country into bankruptcy. In an effort to get behind the closed doors of Capitol Hill and see how and why Congress really makes its decisions, Jim and Ellen decide to run an experiment.
Cheetah: Boston Dynamics Running Robot
March 6th, 2012Just FYI: You guys never need to submit stories that are mentioned on Slashdot.
Via: Forbes:
A warning for anyone who imagines a Skynet-ruled world of robot domination: Don’t watch the video below. Or if you do, prepare for nightmares of being chased at 18-miles an hour by a gas-powered steely automaton.
Boston Dynamics, a Waltham, Massachusetts technology firm and DARPA contractor, announced Monday that it’s broken the speed record for legged robots. Its new four-legged creation is Cheetah, which can run at 18 miles an hour, far faster than the 13.1 miles per hour record set by MIT in 1989.
When I spoke with Boston Dynamics ten months ago, the company’s president Marc Raibert told me the firm was building a four-legged robot that would run at 20 mph by late 2012. It seems to be ahead of schedule. As well as hitting that 20 mph mark, the company also aims to take Cheetah out of the lab and onto other terrains. “While 18 mph is a good start, our goal is to get Cheetah running much faster and outdoors,” reads a statement from Boston Dynamics’ chief roboticist Alfred Rizzi. “We designed the treadmill to go over 50 mph, but we plan to get off the treadmill and into the field as soon as possible. We really want to understand the limits of what is possible for fast-moving robots.”
