February 12, 2015

U.S. Dog Shows Up at Hospital Where Owner Is Battling Cancer

Call it coincidence or love, but a miniature Schnauzer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, ended up at the hospital where her owner is battling cancer -- even though the dog was originally 20 blocks away at home.

A surveillance camera in the hospital lobby caught the dog entering through the automatic doors and wandering around.

The dog, named Sissy, belongs to Nancy Franck, 64, who has been at Mercy Medical Center for about two weeks following surgery. Her husband, Dale Franck, 66, had been taking care of Sissy and her brother Barney, also a miniature Schnauzer, back home.

“She was on a mission that night to see her mom," Dale Franck told ABC News today, "but she couldn't find the right elevator to take."

He said he noticed Sissy was missing around 1:30 a.m. this past Saturday, and he was worried sick.

"I kept checking everywhere, calling out, 'Sissy! Sissy!'" he recalled. "I was pulling my hair out."

He finally got a call at 5:30 a.m. from security officer Samantha Conrad at the hospital, saying she had found his dog, he said.

"She found my number and house address from her tag on her collar," Dale Franck said. "I was so relieved, and I asked my daughter go and pick her up."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/dog-shows-hospital-owner-battling-cancer/story?id=28916913

That's a smart little nose...

February 12, 2015

With a captain like this, who needs enemies??

February 12, 2015

CONFESS! Which one of you loungers is responsible for THIS?!

https://twitter.com/BBC5thfloor/status/564788639251836930

February 12, 2015

Glenn Greenwald Will Speak to a Koch-Funded Event

Glenn Greenwald Will Speak to a Koch-Funded Event Named After a Pro-Lynching Racist Dixiecrat Congressman

Other group headed by Allen West and funded in part by the Koch brothers


“Only a short time ago… their [black] ancestors roamed the jungles of Africa in absolute savagery…[Y]ou do not know where the beast is among them. Somewhere in that black mass of people is the man who would outrage your wife or your child, and every man who lives in the country knows it.”
— Congressman Hatton W. Sumners

Read more at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/44314_Glenn_Greenwald_Will_Speak_to_a_Koch-Funded_Event_Named_After_a_Pro-Lynching_Racist_Dixiecrat_Congressman#tSkUVSWTWVPueAOi.99


http://www.ncpa.org/events/glenn-greenwald


Read more at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/44314_Glenn_Greenwald_Will_Speak_to_a_Koch-Funded_Event_Named_After_a_Pro-Lynching_Racist_Dixiecrat_Congressman#tSkUVSWTWVPueAOi.99


EDIT: I've got to grudgingly admit I'm at least a little impressed...(no snark) I can't think of any other political figure who gets invited to speak by the far left, the far right, the socialists, free market libertarians, the moderates, foreign governments, the tech community, the hacking community, the one-percenters, the Alex Jones black helicopter fringe crowd, etc...

February 11, 2015

United Airlines software glitch sells first-class transatlantic fares for $75(!)

United Airlines ‘Denmark’ glitch offers first-class transatlantic flights for just £50

A glitch on a US air carrier's website led to first-class transatlantic flights being sold for as little as £50 ($75). People were quick to snap up the "bargain" flights on United Airlines' website, after the blunder was spotted by a travel blog. If users to the website changed their host country to Denmark, it was possible to book a round-trip flight between London’s Heathrow airport and Newark’s Liberty International airport for 491 Danish kroner (about $75). The bug also allowed customers to buy cheap tickets to any US destination from Heathrow. Passengers had to choose first class or business class.


The DansDeals blog advised people to use a card without a foreign transaction fee and to not sign into their United account. A number of people appeared to be successful in claiming the tickets today before United Airlines spotted the mistake.

A spokesman for the airline said it was looking into the issue and had temporarily suspended sales from the airline’s Denmark website.

"United is looking into an issue whereby a third-party software provider applied an incorrect exchange rate for tickets sold from the airline’s Denmark website. We have temporarily suspended sales from the Denmark website and are working to resolve the issue with the provider."

The airline didn't say whether it would honour the tickets that had already been bought. However, in the past the airline has allowed customers to keep cut-price flights due to glitches.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/leisure/11406432/United-Airlines-Denmark-glitches-offers-first-class-transatlantic-flights-for-just-50.html

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/6312745/

February 11, 2015

Liberal Organizing Group Implodes In One Tumultuous Afternoon

WASHINGTON — The New Organizing Institute, a progressive grassroots outfit responsible for training many of the Democratic party’s digital organizers, has to be rebuilt from the ground up after a mass exodus of senior staff and employees Tuesday.
Frustrations over fundraising and the management style of Executive Director Ethan Roeder, the former top data guru for President Obama’s presidential campaigns, led senior staffers to quit and several employees to follow them out the door after the nonprofit’s board of directors refused to fire Roeder at the staff’s request. Staff who left said that layoffs followed the mass resignation, but the board denies that.
Late Tuesday night it was unclear how many paid employees remain of the 20 or so staff at NOI, and most of the senior team left for good. It’s a potentially crushing blow for the lefty group best known for its well-attended annual RootsCamp “unconference” that has become a focal point for progressive politics. Last year’s Rootscamp featured speeches by top progressives including Elizabeth Warren.
In an interview, NOI co-founder and board chair Judith Freeman said NOI will go on and promised new fundraising streams to dwindling coffers.
The events that would eventually lead to the mass exodus began Monday, when senior members of the leadership team gave the board an ultimatum in the form of a memo, according to multiple sources: either Roeder went, or they would. Staff expressed frustration about money woes that have mounted since August, when fundraising streams began to dry up.
That memo led to a chaotic Tuesday. Stories differ as to what exactly happened. Freeman said eight staffers signed the memo, and they were dismissed by the board. A staff source said seven signed the memo, seven more were “let go” and three resigned in protest. Multiple staff said resigning and dismissed staffers were told to turn in their equipment and leave the building immediately, leading to a sense of “shock” within the small progressive outfit.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/new-organizing-institute-implodes#.beYdkyK6

anybody know anything about this??

February 11, 2015

Poll: 42% oppose private drone ownership

According to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll, 42 percent of Americans oppose private ownership of drones.

That’s an impressive number, particularly considering that the pollsters say many of the respondents were surveyed before a quad copter crashed on the White House grounds last week. I wonder too if some respondents had confused small consumer unmanned aerial vehicles for the “killing-machine” drones utilized to an unprecedented extent by the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the percentage of people calling for mere regulation of the small aircrafts almost seems low, at 73 percent. That a full 27 percent of Americans who believe flying robots carrying cameras or other invasive devices, should go fully unregulated (or else they don’t know). This regulation from the Federal Aviation Administration has been late in coming, after two years of debates and revisions.

http://pando.com/2015/02/05/poll-42-oppose-private-drone-ownership/

February 11, 2015

Hong Kong bitcoin exchange MyCoin believed to be a $386M ponzi scheme

It’s been just two weeks since the bitcoin ecosystem celebrated news of the first regulated United States bitcoin exchange, launched by Coinbase. Today, the industry is once again being reminded just how important this level of oversight and scrutiny can be. The South China Morning Post reports that Hong Kong’s MyCoin exchange has shut down, taking with it as much as $386 million of investor funds.

Unlike most prior bitcoin scandals – of which there are many – the funds in question are not client trading deposits, but rather a form of equity investments. MyCoin was selling what it described as bitcoin contracts, under which the company would give its “clients” a return of 90 bitcoin ($19,080) after just four months on an investment of just HK$400,000 ($51,560). The victims are everyday citizens who authorities now suspect were the unwitting participants in a ponzi scheme. The company previously claimed that it had raised at least HK$1 million ($128,900) from 3,000 clients. Authorities have yet to corroborate this astonishing sum.

The Post now reports investors were promised to see their money more than double in four months, causing many to mortgage their properties for additional funds to invest. Others report being offered prizes like cash or Mercedes cars for recruiting additional investors. Investors were prohibited from cashing out their investments unless they recruited additional clients. The company hosted fundraising events at luxury hotels across China throughout the last year.

The biggest victim is believe to have invested HK$50 million ($6,445,000). Clients reportedly don’t have any physical documentation backing up their investment, only trading contracts on the MyCoin’s erstwhile exchange.

One female victim with the surname Lau, who lost $1.3 million, tells the Post, “No one seems to know who is behind this. Everyone says they too are victims … but we were told by those at higher tiers [of the scheme] that we can get our money back if we find more new clients.”

http://pando.com/2015/02/09/hong-kong-bitcoin-exchange-mycoin-believed-to-be-386m-ponzi-scheme/

http://news.yahoo.com/hong-kong-warns-over-digital-currencies-amid-alleged-042144223--sector.html

February 11, 2015

How the ACLU, Ron Paul and a former EFF Director helped jail a CIA whistleblower

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who went public about torture programs and was later jailed for leaking the name of a covert CIA agent, was just released from prison to serve out the remaining months of his sentence under house arrest. Kiriakou is the first CIA spy ever jailed for leaking secrets, and only the second American ever convicted under a 1982 law making it a crime to publicly identify covert CIA agents.

The story of how that law, the “Intelligence Identities Protection Act,” came to be is an important and depressing story in its own right, one that’s been totally forgotten. And for good reason: Bad memories are best suppressed, until they creep back up and become a serious “now” problem, and you need to figure out how things got to this point.

The story behind the 1982 law used to jail Kiriakou fills in some of the blanks about how the modern secrecy apparatus was first put together beginning in the Reagan-Bush years. It also reveals the complicity and collaboration of our leading civil libertarians in creating the secrecy-and-censorship leviathan that these same civil libertarians claim to be fighting today on our behalf. Everyone from the ACLU, libertarian hero Ron Paul, even the first executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was complicit in giving us the anti-whistleblower law that put John Kiriakou in prison.

First, some background. Before 1982, there was no law making it illegal to publish the name of a covert CIA agent. And until the early-mid 1970s, there was no need for one: self-censorship in the establishment media kept this problem to an absolute minimum. But by the mid-1970s—with Watergate, the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and shocking exposés on CIA programs spying on American dissidents at home, assassinating foreign leaders overseas, and running bizarre behavior modification drug experiments—the country’s mood had swung sharply leftward, anti-authority, and especially anti-CIA.

Journalists and whistleblowers who uncovered CIA spies and operations were suddenly the new pop culture heroes, while the CIA became Hollywood’s pop culture villains, whose evil needed almost no explanation. Polls showed the percentage of Americans who distrusted government rose from 22 percent in 1964, to 62 percent in 1974. Ratings that the CIA would’ve envied: polls showed the Agency was “highly regarded” by just 14 percent of Americans, and just 7 percent of college students. As the Church and Pike Committee hearings exposed CIA scandal after scandal, liberals in Congress like Ron Dellums and Mo Udall were calling for completely gutting or abolishing the Agency outright.

http://pando.com/2015/02/07/how-the-aclu-ron-paul-and-a-former-eff-director-helped-jail-a-cia-whistleblower/

February 10, 2015

The case for a non-white Spider-Man

Spider-Man will soon be joining the likes of Iron Man and Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but will the man underneath the mask be black or white?

Here's how thousands of social media users have reacted to news of a deal between Sony Pictures and Walt Disney that means Spiderman may now be in an Avengers movie: they've begun a debate about Spidey's race. So far there have been two big-screen iterations of Spiderman swinging through New York, and in both of them Spidey's alter-ego has been the lily-white Peter Parker. But now, some comic books fans online now say it is time for a different webslinger to take over - specifically they want a teenager named Miles Morales.

The Morales character has a Hispanic and black background, and has been featured in the comic book version since 2011. Morales took over when Peter Parker died in the Ultimate line of comics, and his looks were based on US President Barack Obama and actor Donald Glover.

So will the new film incarnation of Spider-Man follow suit? Over the past 24 hours, around 5,000 people used Miles Morales' name on Twitter and a hashtag of his name seems to have been briefly trending. On Tuesday, #donaldforspiderman - a reference to the possiblity of Glover playing Morales in a movie version - also got a boost with more than 3,000 tweets. However, many more people online were discussing Peter Parker and the most recent Spidey actor, Andrew Garfield.

"I would be so excited to see #MilesMorales Spider-Man on the big screen!" said one fan. "MCU [Marvel Comic Universe] definitely has enough white guys."

Heroes from minority backgrounds have been rare in the comics world. Most of the ones featured actually have the word "black" as part of their alter egos (Black Lighting and Black Panther, among others). And so when Morales came along, he was seen as a breakthrough by many - an A-list non-white character with critically acclaimed stories and a sizeable fan base.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-31362800