— via reddit
Two energetic Northern Cheetah cubs turned 2 months recently at Chester Zoo in England. The pair, born 4 June, are a male and a female. The zoo says that the two cubs are starting to develop their own personalities, as they climb tree stumps and bounce after one another — via ZooBorns
Privacy? What privacy? That attitude by Google in a recent court filing is causing a storm of controversy that shows at least some users have not yet given up on their right to privacy.
In a motion to dismiss a class-action suit in which Google was accused of violating federal and state wiretap laws because its ad service automatically scans e-mails to determine targeting, the technology giant seemed to have put its foot into it.
Google said that just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use Web-based e-mail today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery
. ECS stands for electronic communications service — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In Germany, Zoo Krefeld’s Black Rhino couple, Nane and Usoni, gave birth to their fourth baby on 13 July. The baby, whose gender is unknown, weighs almost 30 kg. Zoo Krefeld is one of only five zoos in Germany that successfully breed the rare species — via ZooBorns
The odorless and tasteless nature of date rape drugs
can make them impossible for victims to detect before it’s too late. But soon your drinking glass may able to warn you if dangerous chemicals have been slipped into your cocktail. Next month, DrinkSavvy will begin shipping plastic cups and straws that change colour if a drink contains GHB, Rohypnol or Ketamine, three drugs commonly used for spiking purposes. The effort began with a successful $50,000 Indiegogo campaign led by company founder Michael Abramson — who himself was once unknowingly “roofied” during a night out with friend — via redwolf.newsvine.com
There’s a small contingent of House Greyjoy fans who’ve been asking me to make a design for their favourite house this past year, and I am happy to finally oblige their requests! I present the Iron Island Krakens (or Greyoy Krakens) — via Dave’s Geeky Hockey
Scootaloo, while not being able to fly as fast or as high as other pegasi manages to get around town just as quickly using earth pony ingenuity. Although sometimes her still being a filly easily becomes an excuse for recklessness, but at least she has the sense to wear a helmet. Now if only the other ponies she might come crashing through would be wearing one too — via Youtube
PostHuman from Colliculi Productions on Vimeo.
Deltone House Light, Deltone House Column, Decor Candle, Decor Feather and Decor Feather originally uploaded by Red Wolf
Hermit crabs carry crystal-clear cityscapes on their backs, thanks to a series of 3D-printed shells by Aki Inomata. The artist scans the insides of hermit crab shells to ensure a perfect fit, and then prints skylines of cities like New York, Thailand and Greece in plastic using a high-accuracy 3D printer — via WebUrbanist
How do lacklustre candidates like Jaymes Diaz so consistently get pre-selected by the NSW branch of the Liberal Party? Former Party insider Father Kevin Lee answers this question by showing us the seedy underbelly of the NSW Libs, including the parts played by Bill Heffernan, Tony Abbott, the faceless men and women and the influential Catholic cult — Opus Dei — via redwolf.newsvine.com
On 17 May, this little Jaguar cub came into the world, born to Krefeld Zoo‘s breeding pair Bess and Porgy. This is the second offspring for the parents in their time at the zoo. It was a difficult birth, but mother and cub got to do the necessary bonding for the first week of his life. At that juncture, Bess suffered from an inflammation of the uterus, and had to be treated under general anaesthesia for the condition. Fortunately, she made a full recovery, reunited with her cub, and has been doing a great job of caring for her baby ever since — via ZooBorns
A man driving a truck with police lights on top made a mistake Wednesday when he decided to make a fake police stop.
The two men he pulled over and accused of speeding on NM 104 in San Miguel County were actually State Police agents travelling in an unmarked truck.
When questioned by the State Police agents, John Shelton, 26, of Logan, who had a pistol on his hip, claimed to be a member of the New Mexico State Police Search and Rescue, an emergency medical tech and a fire fighter, and said he was being trained as a law enforcement officer — none of which would authorise him to make a traffic stop.
The real officers had police business to attend to and initially gave Shelton a warning and let him to. But they quickly determined they should try to find Shelton again and charge him impersonating an officer, according to a State Police spokesman.
When Shelton drove back by the officers, they flagged him down and he was arrested. The agents also determined that none of what Shelton had said about his connections to law enforcement was true.
The State Police are now asking for help in finding anyone else who may have been pulled over by Shelton — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Prices are kept low through a variety of strategies, the main one being that it often cuts out distributors and other middle men and buys many goods directly from farms and factories. WinCo also trims costs by not accepting credit cards and by asking customers to bag their own groceries. Similarly to warehouse membership stores like Sam’s Club and Costco, and also to successful discount grocers with small stores like Trader Joe’s and Aldi, WinCo stores are organized and minimalist, without many frills, and without the tremendous variety of merchandise that’s become standard at most supermarkets. “Everything is neat and clean, but basic,” Hauptman told Supermarket News. “Though the stores are very large, with a lot of categories, they lack depth or breadth of variety.”
While all of these factors help WinCo compete with Walmart on price, what really might scare the world’s largest retailer is how WinCo treats its employees. In sharp contrast to Walmart, which regularly comes under fire for practices like understaffing stores to keep costs down and hiring tons of temporary workers as a means to avoid paying full-time worker benefits, WinCo has a reputation for doing right by employees. It provides health benefits to all staffers who work at least 24 hours per week. The company also has a pension, with employees getting an amount equal to 20% of their annual salary put in a plan that’s paid for by WinCo; a company spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman that more than 400 nonexecutive workers (cashiers, produce clerks, and such) currently have pensions worth over $1 million apiece.
Generally speaking, shoppers tolerate Walmart’s empty shelves and subpar customer service because the prices are so good. The fact that another retailer—even a small regional one—is able to compete and sometimes beat Walmart on prices, while also operating well-organized stores staffed by workers who enjoy their jobs, like their employer, and genuinely want the company to be successful? Well, that’s got to alarm the world’s biggest retailer, if not keep executives up at night — via redwolf.newsvine.com
California-based artist Sandy Yoo has created a dangerously delicious pie portraying the likeness of a cthulhu. This pie puts all other pastries to shame (or just physically destroys them) — via Laughing Squid
But there’s form here. The Mail still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything — large and small — from Picasso to equal pay for women. Because it has always been against progress, the liberalising of attitudes, modern art and strangers (whether by race, gender or sexuality). Of course they’ll leap on a Stephen Lawrence bandwagon once the seeds of their decades of anti-immigration racism (read a 1960s or 1970s Daily Mail) have been sown, but deep down they have always come from the same place and had the same instinct for the lowest, most mean-spirited, hypocritical, spiteful and philistine elements of our island nation.
Most notoriously of all, they loved Adolf Hitler when he came to power, and as the Czech crisis arose they were the appeasement newspaper. And woe-betide any liberal-minded anti-fascist who warned that the man was unstable and that consistently satisfying his vanity, greed and ambition was only storing up trouble. The whole liberal left, not to mention Winston Churchill, were mocked and scorned for their instinctive distrust of Hitler. The Daily Mail knew better.
In January 1934 Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, younger brother of the paper’s founder Alfred Northcliffe (the 4th Viscount Rothermere is chairman of the company that still owns it) wrote an article called Hurrah for the Blackshirts
. He was sending congratulatory telegrams to My dear Führer
as he liked to call him, right up until a few months before the outbreak of war. For more details read this article by Richard Norton-Taylor.
Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they — and all the reactions to them — had one enormous assumption at their heart.
That the spies know what they are doing.
It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what’s going on in ways that we don’t.
It doesn’t matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.
But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.
It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.
I want to tell some stories about MI5 – and the very strange people who worked there. They are often funny, sometimes rather sad — but always very odd.
The stories also show how elites in Britain have used the aura of secret knowledge as a way of maintaining their power. But as their power waned the secrets
became weirder and weirder.
They were helped in this by another group who also felt their power was waning — journalists. And together the journalists and spies concocted a strange, dark world of treachery and deceit which bore very little relationship to what was really going on. And still doesn’t — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You’ve probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they’re a little less friendly to the people beneath them.
So here’s a question that may seem too simple: Why?
If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don’t have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts.
But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.
Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a showing evidence to support that claim — via redwolf.newsvine.com
When Dmitry Argarkov was sent a letter offering him a credit card, he found the rates not to his liking. But he didn’t throw the contract away or shred it. Instead, the 42-year-old from Voronezh, Russia, scanned it into his computer, altered the terms and sent it back to Tinkoff Credit Systems.
Mr Argarkov’s version of the contract contained a 0pc interest rate, no fees and no credit limit. Every time the bank failed to comply with the rules, he would fine them 3m rubles (£58,716). If Tinkoff tried to cancel the contract, it would have to pay him 6m rubles.
Tinkoff apparently failed to read the amendments, signed the contract and sent Mr Argakov a credit card.
The Bank confirmed its agreement to the client’s terms and sent him a credit card and a copy of the approved application form,
his lawyer Dmitry Mikhalevich told Kommersant. The opened credit line was unlimited. He could afford to buy an island somewhere in Malaysia, and the bank would have to pay for it by law.
However, Tinkoff attempted to close the account due to overdue payments. It sued Mr Argakov for 45,000 rubles for fees and charges that were not in his altered version of the contract.
Earlier this week a Russian judge ruled in Mr Argakov’s favour. Tinkoff had signed the contract and was legally bound to it. Mr Argakov was only ordered to pay an outstanding balance of 19,000 rubles (£371) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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