Gold: $1601
July 18th, 2011Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Update: Silver
Squint hard enough at the daily silver chart and a possible reverse top hat pops out. (Bullish.)
—End Update—
New record high. That is all.
Verizon Refuses to Itemize $4.19 Charge on Customer’s Bill, Tells Her to Get a Lawyer and a Subpoena
July 18th, 2011Representing herself, she took Verizon to court and won.
Via: philly.com:
Bernice Keebler had a simple complaint: Verizon billed her $4.19 for six “local calls” but wouldn’t tell her where she’d called – not unless she got a lawyer and a subpoena.
To Keebler, that stretched the bounds of fair dealing beyond the breaking point. “I think I have the right to know what I am paying for,” she told me in a column about her case last month. Keebler likened the experience to getting a tab at a restaurant with a bottom line for “food,” but no details to review or question.
Billionaire’s Son and Girlfriend Die Within Days of Each Other; Girlfriend’s Bound and Naked Body Found Hanging from Mansion’s Balcony
July 18th, 2011Update: Death of Rebecca Zahau Officially Declared a Suicide
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Rebecca Zahau, the girlfriend of pharmaceutical executive Jonah Shacknai who committed suicide at his Coronado mansion, was distraught over injuries his son suffered in her care and that is apparently why she decided to hang herself, authorities said Friday.
Zahau’s nude body was found in the courtyard of the historic Spreckels mansion on Ocean Boulevard on the morning of July 13. Her hands and feet had been loosely tied, and a noose was around her neck and tied to a second-story balcony, officials said.
Although how she killed herself may seem unusual, it is not unprecedented and there is no evidence that there was foul play, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said at a Friday morning news conference.
Her fingerprints and DNA were the only ones found on the rope as well as the knife she used to cut it into pieces and place sections around her feet, hands and around her neck, Gore and other authorities said. Investigators also conducted an experiment with a woman of similar size to see if she could tie herself up in the same way with the same knots, and they concluded that she could, authorities said.
“Science does not lie,” Gore said.
Zahau, 32, also had taken some black paint and painted a message on the door to a guest room where she had been staying, authorities said, declining to reveal what the message was. Toxicology tests revealed that there was nothing in her system that would have impaired her judgment, they said.
Investigators said they spoke to someone who knew Zahau and that that person said she had been upset for months, was losing weight and not exercising. They described Zahau as being 5-foot-3 and weighing 100 pounds at the time of her death. Authorities also said they found notes in Zahau’s personal journal indicating emotional distress.
The evidence is “compelling” and points “persuasively” to suicide, Gore said.
—End Update—
Update: Nalepa Was Completely Nude, Feet Bound, Hands Bound Behind Back
What color were the candles?
Via: San Diego Reader:
Investigators are still investigating the death of 32-year-old Rebecca Zahau, an attractive woman who was found several days ago hanging by her neck from the second-story balcony of the mansion she shared with pharmaceutical tycoon Jonah Shacknai. Her wrists were bound behind her back, and her ankles were also bound. But most notable of all, according to sources close to the case, is the fact that she was completely and utterly naked.
“At this point, we can’t be certain whether Zahau’s death was a homicide or a suicide,” said Sheriff’s Captain Tim Curran at a joint news conference held with Coronado Police Chief Lou Scanlon. “It’s possible that after slowly removing all of her clothes in a mysteriously symbolic candlelit ritual, she slipped the rope over her own neck, then had an accomplice tie her wrists and feet before hurling her bare-skinned self over the balcony rail.”
“Alternatively,” added Scanlon, “She may have stripped out of her clothing in preparation for a luxurious bubble bath and then been surprised in the altogether by an assailant, who seized her exposed body, bound her unguarded flesh, and sent her plummeting nakedly to her death.”
—End Update—
Via: ABC15:
The 6-year-old son of a pharmaceutical company executive died Sunday, almost a week after falling down the stairs at his father’s historic mansion — the same house where his father’s girlfriend was found dead hanging nude from a balcony two days later.
In an email Sunday, Scottsdale billionaire Jonah Shacknai said his son Max died “despite heroic efforts on the part of paramedics and hospital staff.”
Police said the young boy fell down the main staircase of the family’s Coronado Island mansion on Monday, in what appeared to be a tragic accident.
At least two TV stations said that Shacknai, who is the CEO of Medicis Pharmaceuticals, was at the hospital with his ex-wife at Max’s bedside while doctors arranged to have his organs donated.
The boy’s father was not home at the time. Instead, Max was in the care of Shacknai’s live-in girlfriend, 32-year-old Rebecca Nalepa.
Nalepa was found dead on Wednesday by Shacknai’s brother Adam, who was staying in the guest house. Police said she was found dead hanging nude from a balcony at the mansion, her hands and feet bound.
Sheriff’s Capt. Tim Curran has called the death “very bizarre.”
Sheriff’s investigators have not established any connection between the two deaths, and have not determined if Nalepa was a crime victim and have made no arrests. They said they have not ruled out suicide.
Police Across the Nation Will Roll Out Face-Recognizing iPhone Tech This Year
July 17th, 2011Via: Popular Science:
A controversial piece of facial recognition technology … is rolling out in police stations across the country this fall, and naturally not everyone is happy about it. The Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System (MORIS) uses an augmented iPhone to snap pictures of faces, scan fingerprints, and even to image irises, and then combs through police databases looking for matching identities. This, understandably, has privacy and civil liberties advocates crying foul.
The MORIS device attaches to the back of an iPhone, adding roughly 1.75 inches to the thickness of the smartphone. Police officers armed with the tool can take a photo of a person’s face from about five feet away, or scan his or her iris from about six inches, and wirelessly beam that data to law enforcement databases elsewhere to look for a match. It can also perform remote fingerprint matching.
Similar biometric technology has been deployed by the U.S. military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to confirm the identities of civilians entering military safe zones and to search for known insurgents at checkpoints. But rolling it out in the streets of the U.S. has plenty of people concerned with privacy and Constitutional issues.
Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine
July 16th, 2011Via: Wired:
You don’t need to have 5,000 friends of Facebook to know that social media can have a notorious mix of rumor, gossip and just plain disinformation. The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.
On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.
This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.
And Now… Bodyguard Who Killed Karzai’s Brother Was Trusted CIA Contact
July 16th, 2011Via: Independent:
The bodyguard who assassinated President Hamid Karzai’s brother had been working closely with US Special Forces and the CIA before he was recruited by the Taliban, raising fears over the Islamist movement’s increasingly sophisticated intelligence apparatus which has managed to threaten the inner circles of power in Afghanistan.
Sardar Mohammad, who shot Ahmed Wali Karzai at his home in Kandahar City on Tuesday, also held regular meetings with British officials, and had two brothers-in-law serving in a CIA-run paramilitary unit, the Kandahar Strike Force, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
Related: Ahmed Wali Karzai, Brother of Afghan President, Killed by Trusted Guard
Beef Contamination Spreads in Japan as Cattle Eat Radiation-Tainted Straw
July 15th, 2011Rice straw.
Via: Bloomberg:
More beef from cattle in Japan that ate straw tainted by radiation has found its way into the food supply, deepening concern about the safety of meat as the country struggles to contain the spread of the contamination.
Cattle at the farm in Asakawa, about 60 kilometers from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station, were fed with rice straw containing 97,000 becquerels of cesium per kilogram, compared with the government standard of 300 becquerels, said Hidenori Ohtani at the livestock division of the Fukushima prefectural government. The farm shipped 42 cattle in the past three months to slaughterhouses in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba and Miyagi prefectures, which were processed into meat and sold to distributors, he said.
The discovery comes a week after the Tokyo metropolitan government said it detected beef tainted by radiation for the first time, underlining the severity of contamination caused by the stricken station in Fukushima, site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Greg’s Cable Map
July 15th, 2011Via: cablemap.info:
Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the undersea communications infrastructure. The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathere by simply googling and transcribing as much data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded format.
Contagion
July 15th, 2011Via: YouTube:
Recovery: Hundreds Scramble for Dallas County Rental Vouchers
July 15th, 2011Zombie Apocalypse News Presents…
Via: WFAA:
Research Credit: matt
