There's a story at ABC News about how a handful of people stole several items from the home of an Italian rock star while he was in concert.

It was billed as one of Italy's biggest rock concerts and it seemed as though the whole city had turned out to see Luciano Ligabue play in front of 200,000 fans on Saturday night.

But unfortunately for him, at least a handful of people in the northern town of Reggio Emilia decided not to attend the gig.

Instead, knowing he was not at home, they opted to burgle the rock star's house.

"The burglary happened while he was at the concert," a police official told Reuters.

The burglars made off with two computers, a video projector, a flat-screen TV and even a Renault Clio parked in the 45-year-old rock star's garage, ANSA newswire reported.

Ligabue began making records in the early 1990s and is one of Italy's best known pop performers.

He recently played the Rome leg of the global Live 8 event.

The Chicago Sun-Times has an article about an event in Chicago yesterday. Apparently Toyota was having a private party and rented out Millenium Park downtown. So GM sent out a bunch of their people to hand out vouchers to tourists for free rides to other attractions that were open around the city. They had chauffeurs take people in the company's cars, but eventually had to stop when they started drawing too many people.

It's back by request! Create a countdown to anything. The one I've included here is just an example.

There's an article at Yahoo about how forensic scientists are saying that the popularity of CSI has put burdens on them:

Not only are the criminals getting detailed insights into police detection methods and how to avoid them, but the shows have led juries to expect too much certainty from scientific witnesses.

"Jurors who watch CSI believe that those scenarios, where forensic scientists are always right, are really what happens," the magazine quoted forensic sedimentologist Peter Bull from Oxford University as saying.

His view was echoed by Jim Fraser, director of the Center for Forensic Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. He said the CSI effect had placed extra burdens on the painstaking work of the forensic scientists. "Oversimplification of interpretations on CSI has led to false expectations, especially about the speed of delivery of forensic evidence," he told the magazine.

"People are forensically aware," said Guy Rutty from the Forensic Pathology unit at Leicester University. Burglars were wearing gloves during break-ins and rapists were using condoms to avoid leaving DNA evidence.

Car thieves had even taken to leaving cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars to muddy the forensic trail. "Suddenly the police have 20 potential people in the car," Rutty said.

The show has even influenced some people to talk.....

...like this.

Ok, I was thinking about posting this a while ago, but decided not to since it was just kind of funny. But since then, so many things have happened that this deserved a story. Here are the reasons why the President-for-life of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, is insane:

From the most recent article:

• has ordered a zoo be built for 300 species of birds and animals, including penguins, in the Central Asian republic's Kara Kum desert
• In August 2004, he ordered that a giant ice palace be built in mountains north of the capital, but doubts were raised about whether it could be sustained in a desert country that receives just 100-250 millimetres of rain a year.
• Last month, state-run media reported Niyazov's spiritual guide book Rukhnama was blasted into space with two Japanese satellites from the Russian launch station in Kazakhstan as proof that Turkmenistan had joined the space-powers club.
• his poetry and philosophical writings dominate radio and television programmes

And from an older article:

• Banned lip-synching, citing "a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art"
• In 2001, Niyazov banned opera and ballet as not corresponding with the national mentality.
• Last year, he called for young people not to get gold tooth caps and urged authorities to crack down on young men wearing beards or long hair.

The magazine The Nation has a blog entry that describes Barbara Bush's visit to New Orleans and her ludicrous reactions, and another blog entry that depicts the various ways Republicans in the upper levels of our government have tried to divert attention and blame from themselves for the obvious mishandling of the whole Katrina situation. Here's just an excerpt:

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees -- cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases -- former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

"Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media's "Marketplace" program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever. Perhaps the former first lady was amusing herself with the notion that evacuees without bread could eat cake.

At the very least, she was expressing a measure of empathy commensurate with that evidenced by her son during his fly-ins for disaster-zone photo opportunities.

Read on for more about Bush's response and the administration's anti-blame-game blame-game.

Read More...

Yahoo's got an article about some of the "innovations" that will be coming soon to a car near you:

Dr Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at England's University of Oxford, said on Monday scientists were studying utilizing the senses such as smell and touch to develop features in cars to make driving safer.

"Touch is completely unused at the moment," Spence told a science conference.

Drowsiness and distraction are leading causes of road traffic accidents and deaths, but Spence said vibrating seats, belts or foot pedals could alert drivers in a subtle way to a dangerous situation.

Although vibration is not used in current cars he said the Japanese automobile parts manufacturer Denso Corp predicts that by 2020 all new cars will have vibration cues as a standard feature.

"We think the best thing in the future will be to combine vibration plus auditory warning signals," said Spence.

Read on for more details.

Read More...

panicle writes: "Come 2006, it's goodbye to the 'Be kind, rewind' pleadings. I shall miss the nights i spent adjusting the tracking buttons and hand-rewinding jammed tapes :( "

For more information, here's the article at The Washington Post online, or read on to see it here.

Read More...

There's an article at Yahoo about how a professor of animal behavior that was studying orca acoustics accidentally discovered that a killer whale had learned to catch seagulls. It did so by rugurgitating fish near the surface of the water, and then waiting underneath for an unsuspecting bird to arrive. This behavior was repeated, and eventually (a few months later) other whales started to do the same thing.

The capacity to come up with the gull-baiting strategy and then share the technique with others — known as cultural learning in the scientific world — was once believed to be one of those abilities that separated humans from other animals.

But biologists have since proven certain animals, including dolphins and chimps, do this.

"This is an example in which a new behavior spread through a population," Noonan said. "We had the opportunity to see a tradition form and spread in exactly the way that cultures do in humans."

He first shared his research earlier this month at the U.S. Animal Behavior Society Conference in Utah. Since then, he said, his phone hasn't stopped ringing.

dave points out an article on Salon.com which brings up a surprising point.

"'No one can say they didn't see it coming'

In 2001, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken."

Ouch. To top it off, things in New Orleans have quickly gotten out of control as it is increasing difficult to get supplies in since people are firing at even military helicopters in a thoughtless attempt to get rescued. As supplies run out, people have just been getting more desparate, and there aren't enough military/National Guard present to control the situation. I'd predict the political fallout of this is going to really hurt Bush's already low approval rating.