Buford Furrow, a former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations who has been living with the widow of slain terrorist leader Bob Mathews, strides into a Jewish community center near Los Angeles and fires more than 70 bullets, wounding three boys, a teenage girl and a woman. He then drives into the San Fernando Valley and murders Filipino-American mailman Joseph Ileto. The next day, Furrow turns himself in, saying he intended to send “a wake-up call to America to kill Jews.”

Read More on the The Southern Poverty Law Center website

Back in London, wiping strawberry jam from a CD, Reece Maclay agrees. “All the music I’ve ever known I got free, and I didn’t know what owning or paying for music was all about– not that most CD labels charge anything but voluntary fees anyway. But all this isn’t just about trying to turn the clock back ’cause we liked mix CDs when we were kids. CDs started to die when people stopped wanting to pay for a product, and then social media and music streams came along and let people stop paying for it all legally, and the product vanished. But when you can’t see what the product is and someone’s still making money, then the product is you.”

In a formal proclamation Monday, Bunten announced his city will be known as “Google” — Google, Kansas.

The unusual move comes as several U.S. cities elbow for a spot in Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program. The Web giant is going to install new Internet connections in unannounced locations, giving those communities Internet speeds 100 times faster than those elsewhere, with data transfer rates faster than 1 gigabit per second.

The so-called press conference was held at the Utah State Capitol at 1:00 p.m. Monday.

The woman claimed that…Utahns should get behind the initiative that would force homosexuals to relocate to New York City, Portland or San Francisco. According to the woman, who claimed to be Nora Young, homosexuals who chose not to relocate who be forced to undergo therapy that would “rehabilitate” them from homosexuality.

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to “save the country from trending toward socialism.”

The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.

Turns out they’re not on the breadlines or working in industries other than finance; examining data from LinkedIn shows that the brains at the failed Wall Street companies were quickly scooped up by the biggest existing competitors. Here’s where they went:

The American Family Association, a religious right group, is urging that Tillikum (Tilly), the killer whale that killed a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, be put down, preferably by stoning. Citing Tilly’s history of violent altercations, the group is slamming SeaWorld for not listening to Scripture in how to deal with the animal.

However, the group is going further and laying the blame for the trainer’s death directly at the feet of Chuck Thompson, the curator in charge of animal behavior. According to Scripture, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal…”the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.”

Read More: Huffington Post

Think drug-induced hallucinations, and the whirly, spirally, tunnel-vision-like patterns of psychedelic imagery immediately spring to mind. But it’s not just hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, cannabis or mescaline that conjure up these geometric structures. People have reported seeing them in near-death experiences, as a result of disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia, following sensory deprivation, or even just after applying pressure to the eyeballs. So common are these geometric hallucinations, that in the last century scientists began asking themselves if they couldn’t tell us something fundamental about how our brains are wired up.

SEATTLE — Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type.

But leaders of the Tea Party movement credit her with being the first.

Ms. Carender’s first rally drew only 120 people. A week later, she had 300, and six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tax Day Tea Party. Last month, she was among about 60 Tea Party leaders flown to Washington to be trained in election activism by FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader.

The Internet has surpassed newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

National and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans, but the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers.

Additionally, the majority of news consumers say they use two to five websites per day to get their fix—a number we think sounds about right—but a surprisingly high number (21 percent) rely on that one favorite site to get everything they need.

In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace.

Across the UK, local councils and other public institutions now play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere…as a deterrent against bad behavior.

Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations.

Read More in Reason

CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no.

PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen asked for two techniques to be approved that did not get specific approval.

The twelfth technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out.

The Globe and Mail reports on the discovery of what might be the earliest written language, comprised of lines and geometric shapes:

A graphic code uncovered by researchers at the University of Victoria suggests that written communication may have started 30,000 years ago.

Compiling the cave signs of nearly 150 sites across Ice Age France, researchers found striking similarities that suggest human beings may have used a graphic language made up of simple lines and geometric shapes to communicate shortly after the first African civilizations arrived in Europe…suggesting that the “creative explosion” occurred tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought.

26 signs illustrated in a consistent style were found across the sites using images from a digital archive. While the illustrations may be rudimentary – composed of circles, straight lines and triangles – she said they suggest the seeds of a prehistoric mode of communication.

Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and more than half disagree with the theory that humans developed from earlier species of animals, according to the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

[Professor David] Prindle recall[s] a line from comedian Lewis Black. “He did a routine a few years back in which he said that a significant proportion of the American people think that the ‘The Flintstones’ is a documentary,” Prindle says. “Turns out he was right.”

Monday’s heart attack was Cheney’s fifth. The first occurred in 1978, when he was 37. He suffered his second in 1984 and his third in 1988 before undergoing quadruple bypass surgery to unblock his arteries. His fourth heart attack occurred in November 2000, after he became vice president. At that time, doctors inserted a stent to open an artery.

Doctors in 2001 implanted a device to track and control his heart rhythm. In 2008, he underwent a procedure to restore his heart to a normal rhythm.

The companion article was titled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life” and intended to make readers consider the possibility of the United States losing World War II and falling under Nazi control. Thankfully, these are maps of a history that never occurred.

Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 9-1-1 for a medical emergency.

But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year which allows them to call 9-1-1 as many times as necessary.

Residents will soon receive the form in the mail where they’ll be able to make their selection. No date has been set for when the charges will go into effect.

The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Update: The school district admits that student laptops were shipped with software for covertly activating their webcams, but denies wrongdoing.

(Image: IMG_6395, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from bionicteaching’s photostream)

Read More: Boing Boing