Bulls eye!

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Can a man own a word? And can he sue to keep other people from using it?

Over the last few years, Leo Stoller has written dozens of letters to companies and organizations and individuals stating that he owns the trademark to “stealth.” He has threatened to sue people who have used the word without his permission. In some cases, he has offered to drop objections in exchange for thousands of dollars. And in a few of those instances, people or companies have paid up.

“If a trademark owner doesn’t go up to the plate each day and police his mark, he will be overrun by third-party infringers,” Mr. Stoller, a 59-year-old entrepreneur, said in a telephone interview from his office in Chicago. “We sue a lot of companies.”

That last sentence show what Business Model he is using.

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Vapor billows from grayish mud that is rising up from the bottom of the ocean near where a 1 kilometer- (3,300-foot) high column of water vapor shot up in the Pacific Ocean, on Sunday July 3, 2005. Japanese coast guard officials said Sunday after an aerial survey that they believe an underwater eruption has caused a 1 kilometer- (3,300-foot) high column of water vapor to shoot up from the Pacific Ocean near Iwo Jima.

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More than six weeks after she disappeared from a home where family members were bludgeoned to death, an 8-year-old girl was found safe Saturday, sharing a meal with a registered sex offender at a Denny’s restaurant in her hometown.

Shasta Groene was reunited with her father, but her 9-year-old brother, Dylan, remained missing and was feared dead, Kootenai County Sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger said.

“Our initial information is that he may be deceased,” Wolfinger said, adding that officials were continuing the search for him. He said investigators believe Dylan was alive when the children disappeared.

Joseph Edward Duncan III, a registered sex offender from Fargo, N.D., was arrested and charged with kidnapping. He was being held without bond, and Wolfinger said more charges were possible.

Duncan, 42, had an outstanding warrant for failing to register as a high-risk sex offender and was facing charges of molesting a 6-year-old boy in Minnesota. He had been released on bail in April, just weeks before the children disappeared.

Shasta was spotted by a waitress early Saturday just miles from the home where her mother, older brother and mother’s boyfriend were discovered bound and bludgeoned to death on May 16.

Amber Deahn, 24, said she thought she recognized the girl eating onion rings, cheese sticks and chicken strips with an older man. Shasta’s picture has been posted around town and shown in the media.

“It clicked in my brain that she looks familiar,” she said.

Deahn tried to keep the pair at the restaurant longer by giving the girl crayons, coloring paper and a mask from the movie “Madagascar,” and offering the girl dessert.

“I was trying to figure out a way to keep them there so the officers would have time to get there,” she said.

If somebody reading this meets Amber Deahn, tell her she’s a hero.

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A 59-year-old Japanese psychiatric counselor set a world record of sorts Sunday by reciting “pi,” or the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, to 83,431 digits.

“I thank you all for your support,” Akira Haraguchi told reporters and onlookers when he finished the overnight 13-hour feat at a public hall in Kisarazu in Tokyo’s southern suburbs at 1:26 a.m.

The ratio is about 3.14159.

According to the authoritative Guinness Book of World Records, the previous record for reciting pi from memory — 42,195 digits — was set by a then Japanese university student in 1995.

Dutch drum maestro Han Bennink plays a drumkit made of cheese as part of the current MOCCA exhibit, Demons Stole My Soul: Rock ‘n’ Roll Drums in Contemporary Art.

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On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.

The ‘financial irregularities’ described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated, handing out truckloads of dollars for which neither they nor the recipients felt any need to be accountable. The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.

Better break out the popcorn.

If you thought the Bolton nomination was a shit-storm through Congress/Senate, wait ’till you see this one.

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For $10,000 and a brighter future for her son, Kari Smith on Wednesday became a real life pop-up ad for a virtual casino.

“It feels like someone is taking a pin and just stabbing you with it,” Smith told her son, Brady, seated nearby on the floor as tattoo artist Don Brouse — in permanent black block letters — branded her forehead with the Web site domain GoldenPalace.com.
The 30-year-old Bountiful mother, who put the space up for auction on the Web, will be promoting the multinational gambling site, which makes the claim — using a little more color and a lot more flash — to be the No. 1 online casino.
“Will it go numb?” she asked.
“It’ll go as numb as your brain,” Brouse replied.
“My brain is already numb,” she said, laughing.
Smith’s ad is a labor of love and actually a positive in her life, something she says her life hasn’t been filled with lately: a failed marriage and deaths of several family members — most recently, her sister in a car crash April 18.
Smith said the money will give her son the education boost she believes he needs after falling behind in school since the accident.
“For the all the sacrifices everyone makes, this is a very small one,” she said. “It’s a small sacrifice to build a better future for my son.”
Still, Smith said she knows most people won’t understand why she’s sold her forehead as advertising space.
“I really want to do this,” she said. “To everyone else, it seems like a stupid thing to do. To me, $10,000 is like $1 million. I only live once, and I’m doing it for my son.”
Brouse didn’t understand it, either.
In his 24 years, he’s turned away a lot of customers who want to get tattoos that can’t be covered up with clothing. He and his staff spent nearly seven hours Wednesday trying to talk Smith out of it.

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A massive ferry lost power while docking Thursday and mowed through dozens of boats at a marina, running aground and sending some terrified bystanders fleeing.

“I saw at least two people literally running for their lives from the oncoming ship,” said passenger Shawn Atleo, who was on the bow of the 140-metre-long ferry. “They obviously heard the horn and I could see the look of shock on the man’s face as he looked up, saw what was coming.”

He added: “There were sailboat masts that were disappearing under the bow.”

Hundreds of passengers were stuck on the ferry for hours and passengers aboard two other ferries bound for the mainland from Vancouver Island were stranded at Horseshoe Bay as the terminal was closed and no vessels were able to dock.

No one was injured, said B.C. Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall.

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Sri Lankan biologists have found dozens of new species of tree frog over the last decade in the island’s dwindling rainforests, but warn many known species are either extinct or on the verge of disappearing because of man.

Researchers from Sri Lanka’s privately-funded Wildlife Heritage Trust found 35 new species of frog — increasing the number of known frog species on the Indian Ocean island by a third — but also found 19 species are now extinct.

“(They) have gone extinct largely because of the loss of their habitat… The land has now been converted to other uses like tea and rubber,” biologist Rohan Pethiyagoda, whose team’s research has been published in the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology, told Reuters on Wednesday.

“The long-term prospect is pretty bleak,” he added. “We know that 11 of these species are on the brink. They are likely to disappear in the next few years unless extensive conservation measures are taken.”

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An AIDS crisis is threatening to overwhelm many predominantly Muslim countries but their leaders remain in a state of denial and are doing little to stem the deadly problem, a pioneering study says.

In one of the most comprehensive reports on AIDS covering the Muslim world, experts warned of serious repercussions if governments continued to sweep the problem under the carpet.

In a report released by the Seattle-based think tank, the National Bureau of Asian Research, they said “if leaders continue to ignore the problem, AIDS could debilitate or even destabilize some of these societies by killing large numbers of people in the 15 to 49-year age group.”

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“What is especially troubling to behold is the reluctance to admit that Muslims engage in exactly those same dangerous behaviors that support the transmission and spread of HIV/AIDS elsewhere,” it said, blaming “deeply rooted cultural and religious attitudes.

“This reluctance even to recognize the problem will only accelerate the epidemic and make it more difficult for the international community to provide meaningful support and treatment,” the report said.

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The study cited Iran and Bangladesh as among Muslim governments that seem to be combating the problem effectively.

“Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami and his administration have been very forthcoming about the extent of the epidemic and the urgent need to control the further spread of the disease,” it said.

“Perhaps surprising, given the Iranian regime’s conservative reputation, needle exchange programs also have been offered in high drug-use areas of Tehran, and syringes are now sold over the counter in many pharmacies,” the report said.

Kelley said some of Iran’s anti-AIDS programs “are more liberal than some overseas programs funded by United States,” citing condom distribution as among areas opposed by some Christian groups.

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As you can see, we chose to use two contrasting color palettes – aquatic and sunbrite – for a total of 10 unique colors in the image, plus an eleventh dark blue for Evis’ pupils. there’s something to be said for the psychedelic quality of mixing blues and oranges. there are something like 34 different colors to choose from, and that’s only the 4- and 5-packs. in the single-pad packages, there are a few others, even dark colors for use with gel and metallic pens and markers – not that they’re anywhere to be found on the 3M website – check with art and craft supply stores if you want the darker variety. the creepy pupils in Elvis’ eyes are a dark blue post-it shade that i stumbled upon in a craft store. in all, post-its, as a medium, make for a fairly complete color palette.