[Quote]:

A Kansas man has been sent to federal prison for nearly eight years for possessing bath salts in Nebraska before they specifically were made illegal by state and federal law.

“This is not your run of the mill drug case,” Steven Miles Sullivan’s attorney, Glenn Shapiro, said at sentencing last week. “He thought he was complying with the law.”

That’s because when a deputy stopped Sullivan on Oct. 27, 2010, in Otoe County and Sullivan said he had K2 and a bag of bath salts in his vehicle neither was illegal.

Both are now, under both state and federal law.

[Quote]:

The new law requires models to provide medical proof of their weight, and for adverts to state if an image has been altered to make a model appear thinner.

(…)

Models in Israel are now required to have a body mass index (BMI) – a calculation based on a ratio of weight to height – of no less than 18.5.

And advertisers have to disclose doctoring of images.

[Quote]:

“Running as an independent candidate is not something that’s particularly easy to do,” Ackerman says. “It’s like running with a parachute.”

Americans Elect plans to throw the independent-minded a ballot line. Candidates can run on the Americans Elect line, but still caucus with the Democrats, the Republicans or no party at all. In effect, the goal isn’t to create a new party, but to provide a new path for moderate members of the two reigning parties.

“People look at the Democratic and Republican primary process at every level and they simply don’t want to go through what is needed to compete,” Byrd says. “Americans Elect is dealing with that pain point.”

Ezra Klein has a really interesting take on Americans Elect, the organization that’s holding an online primary for a third-party presidential ticket. Klein points out that main-party primaries have a polarizing effect on candidates as they have to pander to the “base” in their party which tends to be ideologically extreme. This leads to purer party-line voting in Congress for fear of being challenged in a primary. In the long run (beyond this election cycle), Americans Elect could offer an alternate route to a spot on the ballot.

I don’t know if it’s likely to work, but it’s an interesting take on what A.E. is doing.

[Quote]:

A 16-year-old girl said she was on the phone with the Florida teen shot by a neighborhod watch volunteer moments before he was killed, and that he feared he was being stalked.

Trayvon Martin tried to shake the man following him just minutes before the fatal confrontation that left the unarmed high schooler dead, the unidentified femalesaid, according to ABC News.

The 16-year-old told Martin’s family attorney she was on the phone with Martin on the night of Feb. 26, ABC News reported, and they talked just moments before he was shot to death by George Zimmerman.

And if you can stomach some racism, read the comments section on the news story as reported by Fox News.

[Quote]:

Did you know that vital parts of the US law are secret, and you’re only allowed to read them if you pay a standards body thousands of dollars for the right to find out what the law of the land is?

[Quote]:

A preacher introduces Rick Santorum at a campaign rally by calling on Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all who don’t worship Geeeeeeezus to “GET OUT” of the United States. But, hey, it’s okay. He’s not one of those scary, hateful preachers who can give a candidate a preacher problem—this one’s white.

[Quote]:

An Italian student has won an out-of-court settlement with police after she was stopped under anti-terrorist legislation while filming buildings in London, and later arrested, held in a cell for five hours and then fined.

[Quote]:

You’ve got to hand it to Kirill Tatarinov, the head of Microsoft’s ERP division. The Russian Rocket was cool as a cucumber on Monday when a demo of the Windows 8 Metro UI running on a touch-screen tablet crashed and burned during the opening keynote of Convergence 2012.

[Quote]:

One of the more amazing things about the recent moves by the entertainment industry to put in place stricter laws around the globe to attack file sharing, is that they still don’t realize how pointless this is compared to the only real solution, which is to offer more of what consumers actually want, rather than trying to force them into some old way of doing business. For every “victory” the industry declares, we see more and more evidence that the file sharing just moves further away from what the industry can control (and keeps growing). The Pirate Bay, of course, has always been one of the leaders in mocking the legacy entertainment industry as it continues to operate, despite years-long efforts to shut it down. And even as there are reports of new raids pending, the organization has shifted to magnet links, meaning that taking it down will be even more meaningless than in the past.

Even so, the folks involved in TPB are still trying to go further. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, the latest plan from TPB is to see if it can serve the site from GPS-controlled drones flying over international waters

[Quote]:

They weren’t wearing sagging pants or revealing clothing. But dressing in an orange shirt is apparently enough to get fired at one Florida law firm, where 14 workers were unceremoniously let go last Friday.

In an interview with the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, several of the fired workers say they wore the matching colors so they would be identified as a group when heading out for a happy hour event after work. They say the executive who fired them initially accused them of wearing the matching color as a form of protest against management.

[..]

Ironically, had the employees been wearing orange as a form of protest, it would have been illegal to fire them, ABC News reports.

[Quote]:

The soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians this month ran afoul of financial regulations more than a decade ago when he worked as a stockbroker. He was fined for defrauding a couple from Columbus, Ohio, and when the fine was not paid he was suspended from the brokerage industry, officials said on Monday