The prime minister of Norway acknowledged on Wednesday that his country had fundamentally changed as a result of the attacks on a youth camp and government complex last week, but he vowed to protect the culture of openness that is a source of Norwegian pride — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A rare World War II Victoria Cross has sold at auction in Melbourne for more than $1 million.
The medal was won by Private Ted Kenna while fighting the Japanese in New Guinea in 1945.
Mr Kenna single-handedly took out a Japanese machine gun post — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Dutch designers Nathan Wierink and Tineke Beunders made a lovely wooden table covered with marble runs. The video is mesmerizing. Young children could have a lot of fun with this table — via Neatorama
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is investigating a complaint about alleged inaccuracies in statements on climate change by broadcaster Alan Jones.
GetUp! had made a complaint, which it believed was not being pursued by the broadcasting regulator, but Fairfax Media has learned ACMA is investigating the GetUp! complaint, and some others, concerning Mr Jones.
If the complaint is upheld, Mr Jones may be asked to acknowledge the statement was wrong and promise not to repeat it — via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you get an e-mail message telling you a hotel has erroneously charged your credit card account, be careful. The odds are that it’s part of a new spam campaign that could infect your computer.
The messages started popping up in recent days and there are already hundreds of variants on the same theme: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.
Please see the attached form. You need to fill it out and contact your bank for return of funds,
read one such message, titled Hotel Breakers Palm Beach made wrong transaction
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A European study involving nearly 1000 participants has found no link between mobile phone use and brain tumours in children and adolescents, a group that may be particularly sensitive to phone emissions.
The study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, was prompted by concerns that the brains of younger users may be more vulnerable to adverse health effects — such as cancer — from mobile phones — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google’s new Plus
social networking service attracted more than 10 million users within a week of its public beta. That is a remarkable number of people signing up for an unfinished social network when the field of options is already quite crowded.
Why would so many people flock to Google+? The one thing almost everyone that I know references is privacy and control, or at least the hope that it might achieve that end — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong.
He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with CSI, Law & Order and other television police dramas.
About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, New York, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Ramrattan was arrested.
But he soon took his revenge, US authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via Glennz Tees
For most of the bikes we feature here, performance is relative. (There’s even the odd replica Grimeca drum brake.) There’s no true answer to how much is too much
, but in the streetfighter world, you can never have too much. Most streetfighters leave me cold, but this one stopped me in my tracks. Probably because I’m a sucker for anything connected to Yoshimura, and builder Lee Workman is a kindred spirit — via Bike EXIF
More than 3,000 Roman coins have been discovered in a field, it has emerged.
The hoard of copper alloy coins, dating from the 3rd Century, was unearthed in Montgomery, Powys, several weeks ago.
About 900 were found by a member of a Welshpool metal detecting club, with the rest of the discovery made with help from archaeologists — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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Have you seen the BBC show Restoration Home? Generally speaking, someone buys an interesting or period property, then does the renovation with… variable… results. This disused 1930s fire station in Accrington, Lancashire would be a prime candidate for the show.
Want it? Well, price is on application, although we suspect it’s available for around the £300,000 mark. If you want it for your dream home, get in quick before someone turns it into apartments and offices. Find out more at Rightmove — via WowHaus
A Tribune review of sexual abuse cases involving several Theravada Buddhist temples found minimal accountability and lax oversight of monks accused of preying on vulnerable targets.
Because they answer to no outside ecclesiastical authority, the temples respond to allegations as they see fit. And because the monks are viewed as free agents, temples claim to have no way of controlling what they do next. Those found guilty of wrongdoing can pack a bag and move to another temple — much to the dismay of victims, law enforcement and other monks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile intends to file a lawsuit against Warner Bros for abusing its anti-piracy tool. Hotfile claims that Warner Bros deleted files from the file-hosting service to which it didn’t hold the copyrights. In addition, the movie studio allegedly deleted files from Hotfile without verifying the contents — via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you’re like most people, you give yourself high ratings when it comes to figuring out when someone’s trying to con you. Problem is, most people aren’t actually good at it — at least as far as detecting fake positive consumer reviews.
Fortunately, technology is poised to make up for this all-too-human failing. Cornell University researchers have developed software that they say can detect fake reviews (PDF). The researchers tested the system with reviews of Chicago hotels. They pooled 400 truthful reviews with 400 deceptive reviews produced for the study, then trained their software to spot the difference.
The software got it right about 90 percent of the time. This is a big improvement over the average person, who can detect fake reviews only about 50 percent of the time, according to the researchers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Sue Fondrie, an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh who works groan-inducing wordplay into her teaching and administrative duties whenever possible. Out of school, she introduces two members of the next generation to the mysteries of Star Trek, Star Wars, and — of course — the art of the bad pun.
Professor Fondrie is the 29th grand prize winner of the contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982. The contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began his Paul Clifford
with It was a dark and stormy night
.
At 26 words, Professor Fondrie’s submission is the shortest grand prize winner in Contest history, proving that bad writing need not be prolix, or even very wordy.
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
Sue Fondrie, Oshkosh, WI — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Gillard Government has this week undermined the Labor Party’s long tradition of fairness and social justice. Enough’s enough, says party member Jenny Haines — and she’s not the only one.
Labor Party members are fed up. They are sick of being ignored, especially over refugee and asylum seeker issues. The divide between the politicians in government in Canberra and the party rank-and-file is growing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Stacey Lee Weber does some amazing work with coins. She hammers them into a multitude of objects, including flags, bells, ladders, plumb bobs, hammers, and screwdrivers. This tape measure was made from nickels, silver, silver dimes, and silver quarters — via Neatorama
His name was Rocky, and he was a real-life underdog.
The 8-week-old Siberian Husky-mix puppy was a stray found in a remote section of western Canada, with nothing in his belly but worms on rocks
, Brier Cadden wrote in a 7 February 2010, email. No one wanted to touch him because they didn’t like what his eyes looked like.
Rocky had an eye condition and was almost blind.
Cadden, now 33, sent the e-mail to the Philadelphia-based Blind Dog Rescue Alliance, which she found by searching Google.
What followed was a remarkable transcontinental journey for the puppy. He was flown from the town of Smithers in northwestern British Columbia to Vancouver, then driven to Seattle. From there, he rode with a truck driver to Wisconsin, where he spent a night. He then spent a week being fostered in Michigan before travelling to Philadelphia to stay with Karen Belfi, president of the alliance. He was eventually adopted by a woman in Somerdale, NJ — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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