"In a tough setback for aspiring Saudi female drivers, Saudi police have arrested female activist Manal al-Sharif, who boldly posted a video of herself behind the wheel online on Friday. Our Observer was with her for the symbolic drive.

More than 600,000 people watched the video of al-Sharif chatting with a friend as she drives around the eastern Saudi city of Khobar. The seemingly mundane scene is in fact anything but. Deeply conservative Saudi Arabia is the last country in the world to ban women from driving.

Al-Sharif was reportedly arrested on May 22 while driving, released for a few hours then taken back into custody. A Saudi security official said she is being accused of “violating public order”, and will be held for five days while the case is investigated. The video she made was removed from YouTube following her arrest, as was the Facebook page she created calling on Saudi women to collectively defy the driving ban on June 17.

Nevertheless, a new Facebook page was created almost immediately, and the video survived on video sharing site YouTube, re-posted by Al-Sharif’s supporters..."

-- Yep...

READ HERE

-- Haha! Someone just lost a job... Should have hired someone with experience driving lowered cars, huh? ;)

"LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB Fox 41) -- Police say a woman involved in an argument at a Louisville Pizza Hut raised the stakes considerably when she tried to pull a sword.

It happened Thursday night, shortly after 9 p.m. at the Pizza Hut on 7th St. Rd., near Dixie Hwy.

According to an arrest report, police were called to the restaurant after they received reports that 29-year-old Wynika Mason was "causing trouble." When they got there, she allegedly began yelling at the officers.

An employee told the officers that, shortly before they arrived, Mason began yelling at him and told him that she had a sword on her person. The employee said that Mason, "began to raise it out of the sheath" when her brother seized it from her and put it in their vehicle outside.

Police say Mason told them that she did indeed have a sword and it was still in the vehicle. Officers recovered the sword, according to the arrest report.

Officers say customers and employees were both inside the Pizza Hut when the events occurred, and that the employees, "felt threatened by her behavior."

Mason was charged with disorderly conduct and menacing."

READ HERE

"Shell is making good on its promise to build the largest object ever to float on water, announcing Friday it would build the Prelude FLNG Project to harvest offshore natural gas fields. The gargantuan ship will suck up the equivalent of 110,000 barrels of oil per day.

The floating liquified natural gas facility will dwarf the biggest warships, weighing in at 600,000 metric tons. By contrast, the U.S.’ next-generation Ford-class supercarrier will displace 101,000 metric tons of water. Shell says its ship will be able to withstand a category 5 typhoon.

In some ways, it’s more of a mini-island than a ship, designed to be moored in the same spot off the northwest coast of Australia for 25 years. The facility will be one-third of a mile long — longer than five football fields laid end-to-end — and will contain 260,000 metric tons of steel, about five times the amount used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The ship will chill the natural gas to -260° F to reduce its volume by 600 times, enabling it to be shipped to customers throughout Asia, according to Shell.

Shell did not disclose the cost of building the project, but said it would be built at Samsung Heavy Industries’ Geoje Island shipyards in South Korea, one of the few shipyards in the world capable of building such a monstrous vessel..."

-- Whoa! Check out the size comparison chart @ link.

READ HERE

"Since May 15, residents of many cities around Spain have been demonstrating against the country's ongoing financial crisis, its politicians, and its bankers. The spontaneous protests are the largest since the country plunged into recession in 2008, and they're made up mainly of young people who have set up camps in main squares across the country. Called "los indignados" (the indignant), the May 15 Movement, or simply 15-M, they are fueled by frustration with austerity measures, apparent indifference from politicians, and serious joblessness. Spain's unemployment rate for those under 25 stood at 43.5 percent as of February -- the highest youth unemployment rate in the 27-nation European Union. As Spain enters an election weekend, this collection focuses on some recent scenes of dissent from around the country."

-- This barely got any media attention. Not surprising. Trouble for EU!

SEE HERE

"A young girl was found caged and attempting to eat herself in a mobile home in Virginia, and cops say her parents are responsible.

The malnourished girl, believed to be either 5 or 6, was discovered in a crib that was converted into a makeshift cage after police arrived at the home in Gloucester County to investigate a burglary last week.

The girl's parents, Brian and Shannon Gore, were arrested and charged with felony child abuse. The mother was also charged with attempted capital murder.

However, the gruesome twosome now faces first-degree murder charges after the remains of what authorities believe to be another child were found buried outside their mobile home.

"I've done this for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like this in my life," Gloucester Sheriff's Maj. Darrell Warren said.

A month-old baby boy was also found in the home, but was in good condition. Both he and the older girl are now in the care of the county Department of Social Services.

The horrific find came as police investigated a robbery on April 17..."

-- Some people should be sterilized, or just shot, or both.

READ HERE

-- Scarlett Johansson stars in this behind-the-scenes video for MANGO’s Spring/Summer 2011 collection shot by Mario Sorrenti in Beverly Hills. via

-- Ha!

"The most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent, life scientists report May 19 in the journal Nature.

However, while the problem of species extinction caused by habitat loss is not as dire as many conservationists and scientists had believed, the global extinction crisis is real, says Stephen Hubbell, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and co-author of the Nature paper.

"The methods currently in use to estimate extinction rates are erroneous, but we are losing habitat faster than at any time over the last 65 million years," said Hubbell, a tropical forest ecologist and a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "The good news is that we are not in quite as serious trouble right now as people had thought, but that is no reason for complacency. I don't want this research to be misconstrued as saying we don't have anything to worry about when nothing is further from the truth."

Because there are very few ways of directly estimating extinction rates, scientists and conservationists have used an indirect method called a "species-area relationship." This method starts with the number of species found in a given area and then estimates how the number of species grows as the area expands. Using that information, scientists and conservationists have reversed the calculations and attempted to estimate how many fewer species will remain when the amount of land decreases due to habitat loss.

"There is a forward version when we add species and a backward version when we lose species," Hubbell said. "In the Nature paper, we show that this surrogate measure is fundamentally flawed. The species-area curve has been around for more than a century, but you can't just turn it around to calculate how many species should be left when the area is reduced; the area you need to sample to first locate a species is always less than the area you have to sample to eliminate the last member of the species..."

READ HERE

"The inner workings of a secret North Korean cyberwar college in existence for the past 25 years are finally coming to the surface.

According to the South Korean newspaper the DailyNK, Mirim College, in a mountainous region of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, was opened in 1986 by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, and in the 25 years since has made it its mission to train about 120 students per year in electronic warfare.

The DailyNK spoke to a North Korean defector, Cheong, who said he is familiar with Mirim, although he did not attend himself.

Cheong said basic coursework at Mirim takes five years to complete. Students, who wear the same uniforms as military officials, choose between five departments: electronic engineering, command automation, programming, technical reconnaissance and computer science. The command automation department includes a course, the article said, focused on hacking its southern neighbor, called "South Chosun's Early Warning System and How to Respond to It."

(Chosun is another name for Korea.)

In addition to its highly sensitive curriculum, security guards patrol the grounds, and no car is allowed to enter the college unless it's carrying Kim Jong-il.

After graduation, students join the People's Armed Forces and are frequently assigned to two electronic warfare brigades..."

READ HERE

"TWELVE Christian were murdered in Egypt. Two hundred and thirty-two people wounded. The death toll will surely rise as victims succumb to their injuries. And that's just in the past few days. In the same time period, more Christians were killed in Egypt at the hands of Muslims than people killed in Syria or in Libya as a result of protests, riots and resistance.

Two churches in Cairo were burned in recent days. Over the past few months church property has being gutted, vandalised and violated with graffiti. Churches have been blown up.

An entire community - the Christian community in the new Egypt - is under attack. And the world remains relatively silent. There has been no significant religious outcry, political redress or diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks. There has been almost no media coverage as Egypt's Muslims systematically, over the past few months, set about massacring Egypt's Christians.

The world is not only standing idly by, it is enabling the massacre. The US naively expects that a new era, begun in new Egypt, will ripple to the rest of the Islamic world. So in the midst of these monstrous mass murders in Egypt, the US has decided to send an extra $US1 billion to help the Egyptians ease the economic crisis that emerged as a result of the ousting of Hosni Mubarak on February 11. Muslims in Egypt are on the warpath - on the religious warpath - and the US is feeding them money.

This most recent round of Christian murders began with the rumour that Christians had kidnapped a Christian woman who had converted to Islam. According to the rumour, the woman was being held in the cellar of one of the churches and Christians were brainwashing her back to Christianity. Egyptian Muslims set out to find this woman. Along the way they murdered, pillaged and burned.

The rumours were not true. There was no kidnapping. But there are two burned churches and 12 murdered Christians.

Threats against Christians have become a near daily event since Christmas. On New Year's Day 21 Christians were killed in a church bombing in the ancient port city of Alexandria. Alexandria has a long history of multiculturalism, it should have, and could have, been a model city where Christians, Muslims and even Jews lived together harmoniously. Statistically, there are no longer any Jews in Egypt, but there are still seven million Christians. Instead, Alexandria has become a symbol of attacking Christians. Do not for a moment think that the date January 1 was an accident - the church was bombed in the middle of holiday mass. No one has been prosecuted..."

-- It's Pogrom time! ...

READ HERE

"It's frustrating to be a predatory snail: everybody can outrun you. To make that annoying meal hold still, the cone snail, a giant marine mollusk, evolved a mouthful of hollow harpoon teeth, which it loads with venom, lobs at prey to paralyze them, then retracts into its mouth. But the poison gland itself, which is anatomically unique in its spaghetti shape, has mystified scientists for over a century. Revisiting a strange observation by a 19th century French naturalist who believed that the venom glands developed from tissue stripped away from the esophagus, a researcher cut up baby snails and studied their throat anatomy. She found that a very small structural change in the esophagus, which would have been too small to disrupt an ancestral snail's herbivorous habits, becomes a venom gland after the snail becomes an adult. Reporting online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B today, the researcher says that this smooth transition may explain how these snails developed their complex arsenal and became carnivorous over a short evolutionary timeframe. "

READ HERE