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Jason was a UMass student until early last year. Then, early one morning, he was in his dorm room with two white female friends when two drunk white men, John Bowes and Jonathan Bosse, began peering in the window, yelling racial slurs including multiple if not creative uses of the N word. Bowes and Bosse ultimately broke the window, continuing to yell and challenge Jason to come out and fight them. He called a friend to come support him, and Bowes and Bosse followed the friend into the dorm, continuing their racist abuse and provoking a fight. They broke Jason’s nose, and when they continued attacking him, he defended himself with a pocketknife.

There are multiple witnesses to these facts — to drunk non-students breaking a dorm room window in a racist fury at seeing a black man in a room with white women, going into a dorm they had no business in, and starting a fight. Bowes and Bosse have been reported and arrested for assaults, including explicitly racist assaults with weapons, before in other towns.

And yet, of course, in our “post-racial” society, it is Jason Vassell, minding his own business in his own dorm room until he was attacked, who has been charged with felonies that could lead to 30 years in prison. One of his attackers, meanwhile, has been charged with misdemeanors including a civil rights violation without injury — despite Jason’s broken nose — and the other has been charged with nothing.

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A soap bubble! It really is a real photo of a soap bubble. I’ve been perfecting these shots for the last few months, and this is the result of lots of experimenting and refining. Probably my best bubble. Bubbles change colour depending on the film thickness. This aquamarine phase is just perfect for creating clear reflections. It’s also a gorgeous colour.

A crop of a previous bubble, with a slight adjust on ‘curves’ to take out some of the harsher reflections. You might want to compare this with my other recent blue bubble “Streaky Sky Birdtable Bubble”. This one has a simple and single reflection (from the front surface of the bubble) whereas the other one is split into two, where I think there are reflections from the front and rear surfaces of the bubble.

Can you see all the leaves under my feet?

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The FBI was aware for years of “pervasive and growing” fraud in the mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America’s financial meltdown, but did not take definitive action to stop it.

“It is clear that we had good intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes, the corrupt attorneys, the corrupt appraisers, the insider schemes,” said a recently retired, high FBI official. Another retired top FBI official confirmed that such intelligence went back to 2002.

The problem, according to the two FBI retirees and several other current and former bureau colleagues, is that the bureau was stretched so thin that no one noticed when those lenders began packaging bad mortgages into bad securities.

“We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt,” the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. “Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism.”

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A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server’s. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, “We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because…”

Are you ready?

“…we do not believe in people working on Sunday.”

The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like “I wouldn’t have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn’t come in,” or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their…uh…Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, “Well, we don’t believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight.” And he did. God bless him.

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One day after President Obama ripped Wall Street executives for their “shameful” decision to hand out $18 billion in bonuses in 2008, Congress may finally have had enough.

An angry U.S. senator introduced legislation Friday to cap compensation for employees of any company that accepts federal bailout money.

Under the terms of a bill introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, no employee would be allowed to make more than the president of the United States.

Obama’s current annual salary is $400,000.

“We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer,” an enraged McCaskill said on the floor of the Senate. “They don’t get it. These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses.”