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Leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas turned publicly against their long-time ally President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Friday, endorsing the revolt aimed at overthrowing his dynastic rule.

That leaves… what? Iran? Anyone else?

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When AT&T started slowing down the data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck driver and student, took the country’s largest telecommunications company to small claims court. And won.

His award: $850.

[..]

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said the company is evaluating whether to appeal.

“At the end of the day, our contract governs our relationship with our customers,” he said.

So…. you won’t appeal, then? Because if you do, you’re basically saying that a contract isn’t worth the paper it is small-printed on.

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Officers raided the store on Feb. 9 and found what the police described as among the larger inventories of fake Apple electronics for sale on the East Coast. They said there were 436 iPhones, 21 iPads, 128 iPods — all fake. An official from Apple showed up to verify as much.

“If you walked in and said, ‘I want a 32-gigabyte white iPhone,’ they had it,” Sergeant O’Connell said. “The iPad was the size of a Kindle screen.” Some devices turned on, while others appeared to need to be plugged in first. The police said they also found $2,400 in cash, a bunch of security cameras and two people working, Cindy Liu, 25, and Mo Ling, 36, who were arrested.

There were also 3,697 knockoff versions of the popular Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. They sounded terrible. “It’s like buying ‘Sergeant Pepper’ and discovering it was covered by your neighbors next door,” said Luke Wood, president of Beats.

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What’s next? Perhaps throngs of people in thick-framed sunglasses lurching down the streets, cocking and twisting their heads like extras in a zombie movie.

That’s because later this year, Google is expected to start selling eyeglasses that will project information, entertainment and, this being a Google product, advertisements onto the lenses. The glasses are not being designed to be worn constantly — although Google engineers expect some users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed, with the lenses serving as a kind of see-through computer monitor.

“It will look very strange to onlookers when people are wearing these glasses,” said William Brinkman, graduate director of the computer science and software engineering department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “You obviously won’t see what they can from the behind the glasses. As a result, you will see bizarre body language as people duck or dodge around virtual things.”

Okay, time for some pictures. Here’s the prototype:

And here’s a screenshot for the product in action:

And here’s a leaked photo of the Samsung Galaxy Goggles

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Japan’s financial regulator said Friday it has halted operations of a little-known Tokyo money-management company after the firm allegedly lost billions of dollars in client money.

In one of the biggest cases of its kind in Japan, with Tokyo’s reputation as a financial center still bruised by the billion-dollar Olympus Corp. accounting scandal, the regulator said investigators found that AIJ Investment Advisors Co. can’t account for “most of” the 183 billion yen, or about $2.3 billion, in pension-fund assets under management.

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European Central Bank President Mario Draghi warned beleaguered euro-zone countries that there is no escape from tough austerity measures and that the Continent’s traditional social contract is obsolete, as he waded into an increasingly divisive debate over how to tackle the region’s fiscal and economic troubles.

Which social contract? The one that allowed capitalism to make people rich in the first place? Now that you’re rich the contract is broken?

Fuck you. Stop looting the public wealth in the name of “austerity”. If the social contract is really gone there needs to be a re-evaluation of everything that brought us to this moment. Including banks.

“The social contract is gone” is a call for revolution.

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None of this nonsense has anything to do with religion. The central issue over Ireland and the Vatican has been Rome’s lack of co-operation with two inquiries set up by this State to investigate criminality – the systematic enabling and cover-up by Catholic Church authorities of the rape of Irish children over decades.

Their determination to hide the truth, through lies and mental reservation, rested on what was understood to be required in Rome. Then in May 2001 the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope) contacted every Catholic bishop in the world, including then archbishop of Dublin Desmond Connell and then bishop of Cloyne John Magee.

He directed them to send all clerical child sex abuse allegations “with a semblance of truth” to him. On foot of this and prior Vatican decisions the Murphy commission, which investigated abuse in Dublin, wrote to the congregation in September 2006 seeking co-operation. It got none.

Instead the Vatican complained to Dublin that the commission had not used proper channels, ie it had not gone through the Department of Foreign Affairs. As should have been known in Rome the Murphy commission could not use the Irish State’s “proper channels” as it was also investigating this State’s handling of allegations.

So, in February 2007 the commission wrote to the papal nuncio in Dublin asking for relevant documents. There was no reply. In early 2009 it again wrote to the nuncio, enclosing a draft of its report for comment. There was no reply.

During its later investigations into Cloyne diocese it also wrote to the nuncio. This time he responded to say he was “unable to assist”. That was how the Holy See treated two inquiries set up by our government to investigate the gravest of abuses of thousands of Irish children by priests. It ignored them. This had nothing to do with Catholicism but centrally involved inter-state relations. Because of it, and whatever may happen in the future, the decision to close the Irish embassy to the Holy See was appropriate and proportionate, regardless of the costs argument.

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In an effort to get the bill to the House floor, a special joint committee was formed and legislators were left scrambling for seats. Kach, who had previously backed attempts to define marriage as between one man and one woman, found a space right next to the witness table.

“I saw with so many of the gay couples, they were so devoted to another. I saw so much love,” he said. “When this hearing was over, I was a changed person in regard to this issue. I felt that I understood what same sex couples were looking for.”

A week later, Kach voted for the gay marriage bill on the floor of the House of Delegates, one of only two Republicans to do so. Their support proved vital, as the bill squeaked through the 141-member chamber on a 72–67 vote. The bill’s passage through the Senate also was close – it passed 25-22 Thursday – and Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat and a strong supporter the law, is expected to sign it soon.

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In 2010 from the deck of a cruise ship along the coast of Brazil, amateur photographer and retired geologist Bob Hulse snapped some high-resolution photographs of something unusual leaping from the sea: what appears to be dozens of squid propelling themselves through the air and at incredible speeds. Quite possibly the first time the impressive display had ever been caught on film. Researchers had suspected for sometime that squid can sometimes leave the water’s surface. A 2004 study by University of Miami researchers collect six such sightings, but because the paper included no photographs or video clips its evidence was largely anecdotal. Documented instances of flying squid remained frustratingly rare.
The Hulse photographs changed all that. Ronald O’Dor, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, has analysed the images. Because Hulse documented the intervals of time between each photo, O’Dor and his colleagues were able to estimate the squid’s velocity and acceleration, and compare them with these values for squid in water. They found that the velocity in air while the orange-back squid (Sthenoteuthis pteropus) were propelling themselves via water jet was five times faster than than any measurements for comparable squid species in water.



Further evidence came from Julia Stewart, a marine biologist at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University in Pacific Grove, California, who uses tagging to track the movement of Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas). Her work found that they travelled faster than anyone expected. “The question this raised in my mind was, ‘Maybe they really are flying?’”



Not only can squid sometimes fly, but they do so to save energy while travelling long distances. Stewart and O’Dor presented their findings during this week’s American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.