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India’s Health and Family Welfare Minister has a creative way to control overpopulation in his country:

“If there is electricity in every village, then people will watch TV till late at night and then fall asleep. They won’t get a chance to produce children,” [Ghulam Nabi Azad] said. “When there is no electricity there is nothing else to do but produce babies.” He added: “Don’t think that I am saying this in a lighter vein. I am serious. TV will have a great impact. It’s a great medium to tackle the problem . . .
80 per cent of population growth can be reduced through TV.”

Netflix and a DVR will do the rest.

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A rural Indian witchdoctor beheaded a five-year-old girl as part of a bizarre ritual to help a villager produce healthy male heirs, police have said.

Vandana Kumari was murdered on Tuesday (local time) in Lakhimpur Kheri district, 200 kilometres from the Uttar Pradesh state capital Lucknow, police officer Ravi Srivastava said Thursday.

Occult practitioner Mewalal Chauhan recommended the “human sacrifice” when the child’s neighbour Ram Niwas came to him for help, Mr Srivastava said.

“Ram Niwas had sons but none of them survived infancy. His brother too was ailing. The ‘tantrik’ Chauhan said a human sacrifice was necessary to get rid of these problems,” he said.

May I suggest another human sacrifice? The witch doctor? That should improve humanity throughout the region quite a bit…

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Citigroup Inc., one of the biggest recipients of government bailout money, gave employees $5.33 billion in bonuses for 2008, New York’s attorney general said Thursday in a report detailing the payouts by nine big banks.

The report from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office focused on 2008 bonuses paid to the initial nine banks that received loans under the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall. Cuomo has joined other government officials in criticizing the banks for paying out big bonuses while accepting taxpayer money.

Citigroup, which gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1 million, is now one-third owned by government as a result of its bailout. It paid bonuses of at least $3 million to 124 of those employees, even after it lost $18.7 billion during the year, Cuomo’s office said.

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A girl who I will call Jessica had been playing at her friend’s house when she fell down with a seizure. The friend’s family, of course, took her to the hospital, where they discovered she had an operable brain tumor. Without the operation she was given a prognosis of about six months to live, but they could get her the surgery within the week. Great news, right? Wrong. Jessica’s family were all devout, fundamentalist Christian Scientists.

Jessica’s family came to visit her in the hospital once they found out, but before asking her if she was alright or reassuring a scared 15 year old girl, they began by chastising her for going to a hospital in the first place. Though not representative of all Christian Scientists, this family believed that faith and prayer are all one needs to cure ailments. Obviously, Jessica wasn’t praying hard enough, or her faith had faltered, causing this tumor. They expressly forbade her from getting the surgery, trying to get her to leave the hospital and go to their pastor for extensive prayer.

To make a long story short, Jessica sided with the doctors. I met her about a week after her surgery, which was a complete success. Despite all this, Jessica was horribly depressed. I discovered this was because her family completely disowned her for getting this surgery. She had gained the rest of her life, but lost the life she knew.

Why is life expectancy higher in Canada? Simple, the US has 10 times as many people as Canada, so there are 10 times as many accidents, crimes and so on.

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In a move expected to revolutionize the mobile device industry, Apple launched its fastest and most powerful iPhone to date Tuesday, an innovative new model that can only be seen by the company’s hippest and most dedicated customers.

“I am proud today to introduce to those who really, truly deserve it, our most incredible iPhone yet,” announced Apple CEO Steve Jobs, extending his seemingly empty left palm toward the eagerly awaiting crowd. “Not only is this our lightest and slimmest model ever, but as any truly savvy Apple customer can clearly see, it’s also the most handsome product we’ve ever designed.”

The packed auditorium, which had been listening to Jobs in hushed reverence for several minutes, then erupted into applause, with hundreds of men and women suddenly jumping to their feet and shouting, “I can see it!” “Look, there it is!” and “God, it’s so beautiful!”

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According to the findings of a recent Department of Health and Human Services study, school lunch programs that teach children to avoid all contact with food may not be an effective method of reducing teen obesity rates.

Despite the popularity of abstinence-only meal programs in schools across the country, the study found that children who were provided with no food at lunch and cautioned against eating at an early age were no less likely to become overweight than those who were provided with a well-rounded nutritional education.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the findings could adversely affect federal funding for all programs that tell kids “lunch is worth waiting for.”

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“The Ringworm Children” (translated in Hebrew as “100,000 Rays”), directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, recently won the prize for “best documentary” at the Haifa International film festival, and in the past year has made the rounds of Jewish and Israeli film festivals around the world. But it had yet to come to Israeli television screens. The subject is the mass irradiation of hundreds of thousands of young Israeli immigrants from Middle Eastern countries — Sephardim, as they are called today. The story goes like this:

In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba, flew to America and returned with seven x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army.

They were to be used in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths to be used as guinea pigs. Every Sephardi child was to be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of x-rays through his head. For doing so, the American government paid the Israeli government 300 million Israeli liras a year. The entire Health budget was 60 million liras. The money paid by the Americans is equivalent to billions of dollars today.

To fool the parents of the victims, the children were taken away on “school trips” and their parents were later told the x-rays were a treatment for the scourge of scalpal ringworm. 6,000 of the children died shortly after their doses were given, while many of the rest developed cancers that killed thousands over time and are still killing them now. While living, the victims suffered from disorders such as epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic headaches and psychosis.

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This one falls into the small potatoes department. But I think it’s important to always shine a light on the never-ending parade of hypocrisy that is the Republian party.

State Sen. Paul Stanley, R-Germantown, (TN) was blackmailed by a man who claimed to have explicit photos linking Stanley and his legislative intern, authorities said Tuesday.

Germantown is a Memphis surburban community. Lot of white folks with a lot of money.

Clarksville, Tenn., resident Joel Palmer Watts, 27, told police after his arrest in a sting that his girlfriend was involved in a “sexual relationship” with Stanley and that he found explicit photographs of his girlfriend that appeared to have been taken in the Republican senator’s Nashville apartment.

Republican Paul Stanley claims to be an Evangelical Christian. Now there’s a big shock.

The girlfriend is identified in a police affidavit as McKensie Morrison. She is a junior at Austin Peay State University and was one of her school’s two legislative interns this year. Her age was not available.

Her age may not be available, but her pictures are here.

Republican Paul Stanley is 47. The young lady in question appears to be in her very early 20′s….as in…young enough to be his daughter.

The entire housing crisis summed up in one house in Palm Springs. Sold for $119,000 in 2003, $200,000 in 2004, $350,000 in 2005, $450,000 in 2006, foreclosed by the bank in 2008, sold for $32,500 in 2009

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A 14-year-old boy was charged Wednesday as an adult with two counts of sexual assault and kidnapping, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said. He appeared in court Thursday and was being held without bond.

A public defender assigned to represent him did not immediately respond to a message left Friday afternoon.

The other boys — ages 9, 10, and 13 — were charged as juveniles with sexual assault. The 10- and 13-year-old boys also were charged with kidnapping, the office said Thursday.

Police say the girl’s father told a police officer and a Child Protective Services worker that he doesn’t want her anymore.

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Taking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

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“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use.

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Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

Somebody needs to explain AP how easy it is to add DRM to my browser…

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Myriad Genetics, a private company in Salt Lake City, owns a patent on breast cancer genes known as BCA1 and BCA2. Women who have these genes have a significantly higher risk of contracting breast and ovarian cancer. But because of its patent, Myriad is the only source of diagnostic testing for the genes.

Myriad is also the only research center that is allowed to study the BCA genes. Everyone else needs formal permission, which may require a license fee. If you happen to be a medical researcher at Harvard or UCLA or an illustrious European medical center, don’t bother trying to study these genes. It would violate Myriad Genetics’ patent.

And if you want to get a diagnostic test to see if you have BRCA gene mutations, again, you can only go to Myriad Genetics. Its BRCAnalysis® test costs $3,000.

So what do you think the odds are that somebody finds a cheaper test? Or, God of Profits forbid, an actual preventive medication?

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After more than 60 years together, Jimmy Carter has announced himself at odds with the Southern Baptist Church — and he’s decided it’s time they go their separate ways. Via Feministing, the former president called the decision “unavoidable” after church leaders prohibited women from being ordained and insisted women be “subservient to their husbands.” Said Carter in an essay in The Age:

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

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As if the New York Times doesn’t have enough to worry about, with total advertising revenues down 32 percent in the second quarter, its online business is deteriorating as well. In its earnings announcement this morning, the company breaks out Internet advertising revenues of $68 million, which is a 15.5 percent drop from a year ago.

The year-over-year declines keep getting worse, as you can see in the chart above. In the last three quarters the annual decline went from a 3.5 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2008 to a 6.1 percent decrease in the first quarter of 2009 to negative 15.5 percent this quarter.

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I don’t look forward to installing new software. On the contrary, I dread it.

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According to data from market research firm NPD, Apple’s revenue share for PCs over $1,000 is 91 percent.

Betanews reports that Apple’s revenue share went up to 91 percent from 88 percent in May. Last year, I did a story that pegged Apple’s share of the $1,000 plus market at 66 percent. Clearly this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Here are some other interesting facts and figures. In June, the average price for PCs sold at retail was $701, or $690 for desktops and $703 for notebooks.

When you break that down to just Windows computers, the average price drops to $515, which the average Mac price was $1,400. You can break that down further to Windows desktops at $489 and notebooks $520. Mac desktops were $1,398 and laptops were at $1,400.

And given the profitability of Apple as a company, I don’t seen them bothered too much with their absence at the low end…