KARACHI, Pakistan - A mob angered by an al-Qaida-linked suicide bombing in a Shiite mosque set a KFC restaurant on fire in overnight rioting, killing six employees and bringing the day’s overall death toll to 11, police said Tuesday.

...An outraged crowd of about 1,000 Shiites, many beating their chests in mourning, rampaged afterward in this southern city, setting fire to cars and shops and killing at least six more people.

Police recovered the bodies from a KFC restaurant burned by the mob. All were restaurant employees, senior police official Manzoor Mughal said. Four were burned to death, while the two others died after taking refuge in a refrigeration unit, he said.

I'll be working with the MSURF program doing research on coral. I'll be updating this site as frequently as possible so that all of you are able to hear and see (photos) what I'm doing. I'll be in HI until August 6th so see you after then..suckas!

local A in
	local B in
		local C in
			A = -15
			B = 25
			
			{ + A A C}
			{out C}
			
			{ - C C C}
			{out C}
			{out B}
		end
	end
end

-30
0
25

local Add in
	Add5 = proc { $ A1 A2 } 
		{+ A1 5 A2}
	end
	
	local Result in
		{Add5 1 Result}
		{out Result}
	end
end

6

local X in
	X = 1
	{out X}
	
	local X in
		X = 10000000
		{out X}
	end
end

1
10000000

As Tom Cruise's promotional campaign for his "romance" with baby-faced starlet Katie Holmes shifts into high gear, it's running into a brand-new PR problem: No one believes it's for real. ...
Maybe there's been some alarming secret studio poll that proves scientifically (or Scientologically?) that Cruise's weirdness/asexuality rating is at an all-time high.
...
There was a fascinating moment of unscripted suspense when Oprah asked how Cruise and Holmes first met. Perhaps to play for time while he constructed a credible first-encounter fable, Cruise exploded in a fit of embarrassed mirth for what seemed like minutes. "I just called her because I wanted to meet her, you know!" he finally choked out.

Wednesday afternoon, Roland approached a construction worker at the site, in Atlanta's trendy Buckhead district, told him he had already committed a crime and "hurt someone," and demanded that the worker get out of the way, Pennington said. The worker did, and Roland scaled the crane -- and climbed out onto its horizontal arm. He is believed armed with "some type of knife," Pennington said.

• [http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/science.htm "Computer Science" is Not Science and "Software Engineering" is Not Engineering]
  

THIS WEEK Leslie Burke sat in court in a wheelchair and listened while lawyers argued whether he should be starved and dehydrated to death. The lawyers arguing in favour of the proposition were egged on by the Secretary of State for Health, who deemed it too expensive to feed and water the ailing patient.

IGNPC: Maybe I'm sick but I really miss being able to poison a rival city's water supply. Are you going to be including new options for espionage and its more "honorable" cousin diplomacy?

Barry Caudill: We will not be including any espionage options that are terrorism related.

...one thing seems certain – occupying U.S. troops face a steep road to reestablish trust in this tinderbox of ancient hatreds and delicious dairy products.
...
Despite fears of being bogged down in the harsh Mankato winter, troops encountered little resistance, save sporadic eggings from ill-equipped insurgents atop the grain elevators of local cornlords.

CHAKE CHAKE, Tanzania (Reuters) - Mohammed Juma starts to sweat and fidget as he recalls his rape by Popo Bawa, the most feared spirit-monster of the Zanzibar spice islands.

"We believe reading the Koran is our only defence, nothing else," says the 41-year-old driver and father of four. "But Popo Bawa is real, and well prepared."

Holidaymakers on the Indian Ocean islands tend to smile dismissively at accounts in guidebooks of the bat-like ogre said to prey on men, women and children. But for superstitious Zanzibaris a visit from the sodomising gremlin is no joke.

Some attacks were heralded by the sound of giant wings and claws rattling and scraping on huts' tin roofs. Others cringed in terror at what sounded like a car engine ticking over.

"We heard a rustling on the roof," recalls Asha Saleh, in her late 50s, in Machomanne village near Pemba's main town of Chake Chake. "I felt someone fondling me. I felt very cold. I felt weak," she said, recalling the attack some 35 years ago

He also becomes active at election time: a habit that is testing nerves ahead of polls due in October.

• An entity that flies and strikes people in bed, rendering them utterly helpless through supernatural means and sometimes sexually abusing them. Sounds like the M.O. of an alien abduction to me.
  
  
• An entity that takes on many twisted or exaggerated characteristics of an animal but is decidedly unnatural? Chupacabras, Bigfoot, Jersey Devil, Monkey Man. (See below.)
  
  
• An entity that appears in advance of a particular (human) event or tragedy? Mothman, who also falls into the previous category. The Wendigo.
  

• Most obvious: how much imagination is there in the accounts? Obviously I don't believe there is an actual winged creature stalking people and raping them in the night. Do witnesses believe they saw the creature? Heard it? What else could explain their observations?
  
• Was there physical evidence left or injury inflicted by the entity?
  
• How much hysteria is there? People make terrible eyewitnesses in almost any circumstance, but if hysteria is involved witness reliability hovers around nil. One person believing they've experienced something can convince a group of people who simply might have of a great deal.
  
  

Bad romance: Worf and Troi? The big mean feral warrior and the ship’s shrink? I NEED TO MATE. IT IS MY TIME. Worf, I sense you are feeling stress. I HAVE MANIFESTED THE SWORD OF KAHLISS IN MY LOWER UNIFORM. I AM . . . CONFINED. Let’s have some tea and discuss this. YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND. MY PHOTON TORPEDO IS READY FOR THE LAUNCHING TUBE. Sit, you silly fellow! Right here. Mind the flowers. I DO NOT KNOW HOW MUCH LONGER I CAN USE ANALOGIES TO DESCRIBE MY CONDITION.

Owens and Stone, who pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony charge of injury to a disabled person by omission, testified that Amox and Johnson were arguing about country versus rap music when Amox told Johnson to leave.

Then Amox swung at Johnson, who fell and began vomiting and gagging, according to testimony. The men loaded Johnson into a truck and drove to an old tire dump, where they left him on an ant hill.

"Only thing I saw about it, they oughtn't to have dumped him. They could have taken him to the hospital just as easy," Spears said as he drank coffee at a country store with friends. "Things just got out of hand."

But R.C. Taylor, a white retired heavy equipment operator and barber, said the boys didn't deserve harsh punishment.

"It's been handled good as far as I'm concerned. They ought not to have been tried at all," Taylor said. "I think they should be turned loose, set free, with a slap on the wrist. It was just one of those things."

Look at Medicare, which everyone except the AARP agrees is a total financial disaster which will destroy the fiscal health of the United States unless something is done to control costs. Our politicians are well aware of the problem, and so they feverishly worked to--tack on a prescription drug benefit that will add trillions to the bill.

Under current law, Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund, which pays for inpatient hospital care, will be exhausted in 2019, seven years earlier than forecast last year.

-- Medicare costs will grow much faster than the economy as a whole, increasing from 2.6 percent of the gross domestic product last year to 3.7 percent in 2010, 7.7 percent in 2035 and nearly 14 percent at the end of the 75-year period commonly used for long-range projections.

-- Projected Medicare costs would exceed those for Social Security in 2024. By 2078, the level of Medicare expenditures would represent nearly twice the cost of Social Security.
...
Moreover, the full board said, the fiscal outlook may be worse than the official projections indicate, because the estimates are based on the unrealistic assumption that the average Medicare fee for doctors' services will be cut about 5 percent each year from 2006 to 2012, as required under current rules.
...
Bush administration officials said Medicare's financial problems would be far worse if Democrats had prevailed in the effort to pass drug legislation costing twice as much as the new law.

Let's start with the most obvious problem with this state: the cold winters and snow. Look, if you go back and look at the Minnesota calendar of weather, you would see that it is possible that we could have nine months where it snowed. It even snowed in May. IN MAY!!!

...Minnesotans are cliquey (Remember, they call me a transplant). That's right, they travel in cliques. If you aren't from here, it is very hard to break into the clique.

Obsessed with Exclamation Points!!!!

I've just looked at the list of my recent blog entries... and I seem to have a disturbing habit of using an exclamation point every time I write a headline. That's what 10 years in TV news does to you. Everything is shocking!

[The chicks] peered over the precipice but could not summon the courage to make the leap. So mother flew back onto the planter and knocked a couple of them off the planter onto the sidewalk, hopped back down, and quacked at the others to follow, expecting them to get the message.

As the gathering crowd gasped in horror at the outrageous act of cruelty, motherly instincts kicked in and some hand-lifted the rest of the ducklings down to their sad excuse of a mother.

...

The crowd could not bear to see the scene repeated so they hand-lowered the ducklings over the edge of the wall as far as they could, and dropped them into the water, minimizing the impact.

The Super 8 just east of the state line in Council Bluffs, Iowa (Exit 1B or something like that) is a dingy old hole in the wall. It was right next to a truck stop, so that should have been our first clue.

For that matter, much of that entire town seemed to be the armpit of the universe. We saw bounty hunters (pardon me, "extradition specialists") in the Wal-Mart, and all merchandise on the endcaps was tied down with zipties.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Apostrophe boosters were in mourning at the University of Minnesota after it was decided to name a fancy new walkway the Scholars Walk, not the Scholar's Walk.

The board worried that the apostrophe would make the four-block walkway appear exclusive at a time the university wants to be inclusive. It might even mean adding apostrophes to Regents Professors Square and a Professors Lane.

"Apostrophes would be out of control!" said board member Margaret Carlson.

• Muppet Babies rocked my childhood.
  
• People who are super-genius-smart can be equally debilitated as those who are super-retard-stupid.
  
• "Life By Jake" can be funny, but only if you've had some to drink.
  
• Soco works better than warm milk.
  
• Dogma is powerful, whether or not it is coherant.
  
• Girls like horses.
  
• European universities are VASTLY SUPERIOR to American ones when it comes to programming language theory.
  
• You should not order a straight espresso unless you know exactly what you're getting into.
  
• "What were my parents doing at my age?" Can be a powerful question, but it can also be asking exactly the wrong thing.
  
• Tagging is catching on.
  
• With some minor acclimation, you would probably survive life 50 or 100 years ago. 200 years ago, maybe. 1000 years ago, not a chance (you silly peasant).
  
• Wheel of Fortune is now over 50% commercials.. and the best part is that the target audience probably doesn't even notice.
  
• Underestimation of your potential is just as dangerous and probably far more common than overestimation.
  
• The easy way out is usually the worst choice.
  
• Movie stars also have 24 hours in a day, but most of them are spent less wisely than a normal person's.
  
• Stand up straight. Sit up straight. People will think you're doing more important things than if you slouch.