Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

Things I have gleaned from my Twitter feed [on March 20th]: It is the second anniversary of the death of Arthur C. Clarke. Things that are noticeably absent: Any mention that today is the 7th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.

But let’s forget Twitter for a second — though it’s a great measure of where the hive mind is focused — and turn to some more “reliable” news sources. There’s not a single op-ed in the New York Times today to mark the anniversary, or pontificate on where it all went wrong (update: there is a photo slideshow from this weekend’s Magazine). Nor the Wall St. Journal to tell us what went right. Nothing in the Washington Post either. Nor the LA Times. I can’t even find a single link on Drudge. Perhaps even more shocking is that I can’t find anything on Andrew Sullivan.

It’s almost as though where the media is concerned the Iraq War didn’t happen.

Well, Robert Greenwald did not forget: Iraq: Thousands Dead, $747.3 Billion Spent And Not Any Safer

Here’s a study to file under “unworkable but very cool.” A group of Japanese researchers has developed a mosquito that spreads vaccine instead of disease. Even the researchers admit, however, that regulatory and ethical problems will prevent the critters from ever taking wing — at least for the delivery of human vaccines.

Scientists have dreamed up various ways to tinker with insects’ DNA to fight disease. One option is to create strains of mosquitoes that are resistant to infections with parasites or viruses, or that are unable to pass the pathogens on to humans. These would somehow have to replace the natural, disease-bearing mosquitoes, which is a tall order. Another strategy closer to becoming reality is to release transgenic mosquitoes that, when they mate with wild-type counterparts, don’t produce viable offspring. That would shrink the population over time.

The new study relies on a very different mechanism: Use mosquitoes to become what the scientists call “flying vaccinators.” Normally, when mosquitoes bite, they inject a tiny drop of saliva that prevents the host’s blood from clotting. The Japanese group decided to add an antigen-a compound that triggers an immune response-to the mix of proteins in the insect’s saliva.

Read More on ScienceNOW

Amnesty International is calling on Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah to stop the execution of a Lebanese man sentenced to death for “sorcery.”In a statement released Thursday, the international rights group condemned the verdict and demanded the immediate release of Ali Hussain Sibat, former host of a popular call-in show that aired on Sheherazade, a Beirut based satellite TV channel.

According to his lawyer, Sibat, who is 48 and has five children, would predict the future on his show and give out advice to his audience.

The attorney, May El Khansa, who is in Lebanon, tells CNN her client was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police (known as the Mutawa’een) and charged with sorcery while visiting the country in May 2008. Sibat was in Saudi Arabia to perform the Islamic religious pilgrimage known as Umra.

[Read more at CNN World]

Six billion dollars later, the Afghan National Police can’t begin to do their jobs right—never mind relieve American forces.

Mohammad Moqim watches in despair as his men struggle with their AK-47 automatic rifles, doing their best to hit man-size targets 50 meters away. A few of the police trainees lying prone in the mud are decent shots, but the rest shoot clumsily, and fumble as they try to reload their weapons. The Afghan National Police (ANP) captain sighs as he dismisses one group of trainees and orders 25 more to take their places on the firing line. “We are still at zero,” says Captain Moqim, 35, an eight-year veteran of the force. “They don’t listen, are undisciplined, and will never be real policemen.”

Poor marksmanship is the least of it. Worse, crooked Afghan cops supply much of the ammunition used by the Taliban, according to Saleh Mohammed, an insurgent commander in Helmand province. The bullets and rocket-propelled grenades sold by the cops are cheaper and of better quality than the ammo at local markets, he says. It’s easy for local cops to concoct credible excuses for using so much ammunition, especially because their supervisors try to avoid areas where the Taliban are active. Mohammed says local police sometimes even stage fake firefights so that if higher-ups question their outsize orders for ammo, villagers will say they’ve heard fighting.

[Read more at Newsweek]

Nineteen people were hurt, and Harrison has been involved in five accidents in the last three years according to KTRK-TV Houston. Below is the raw footage of the “accident” below from the AP:

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) isn’t just another secret treaty—it’s a way of life. If ACTA passes in anything like its current form, it will create an entirely new international secretariat to administer and extend the agreement.

Knowledge Ecology International got its hands on more of the leaked ACTA text this week, including a chapter on “Institutional Arrangements” that has not leaked before. The chapter makes clear that ACTA will be far more than a standard trade agreement; it appears to be nothing less than an attempt to make a new international institution that will handle some of the duties of groups like the WTO and WIPO.

Why bother? Well, from the perspective of countries like the US, the existing institutions have problems. For one, they feature a huge number of nations, some of whom have blocked some of the anti-counterfeiting provisions desired by the US and others. Call this the UN problem—getting much done with so many people in attendance can be tricky, and ACTA has become a “coalition of the willing” who have decided to go form their own club instead.

[Read more at Ars Technica]

With health care a source of fierce debate in America, a movie like Repo Men was bound to be made. A bloody satire of the marriage between medicine and capitalism, it’s about repo men who collect on overdue artificial organs.

A cult musical about this same topic, called Repo! The Genetic Opera, came out last year, though Repo Men itself was based on a novel called The Repossession Mambo. The idea of scary semi-serial killers who kill to repossess mechanical organs seems to be in the air. Indeed, one of the best parts of Repo Men is the way it captures the sentiments of millions of people who feel dicked over by hospitals and medical insurance companies right now. But the movie’s strength is also its problem: Evil medical corporations are a pretty easy target, and Repo Men gives us a black-and-white view of a problem that is in reality all shades of gray.

Read Annalee Newitz’s review of Repo Men on io9.com

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.

Read More on Yahoo Green

Glenn Beck at CPAC 2010. Photo: Gage Skidmore CC

Thank you Karl Frisch – who doesn’t want to annoy Glenn Beck without actually devoting too much time to doing so? He writes in Media Matters:

Want to annoy Fox News’ Glenn Beck in five minutes or less while simultaneously making sure your community gets its fair share of federal money? Fill out and return the 2010 U.S. Census questionnaire when it arrives in your mailbox.

Few other issues seem to whip media conservatives into a frenzy of misinformation and half-baked conspiracy theories like the decennial count of Americans.

You see, for the world of “conservative journalism,” the census is a manifestation of everything they fear. Put yourself in their shoes: Obama’s administration is hell-bent on imposing a socialist-fascist-communist-totalitarian-Marxist police state, and now he’s sending us all mail! Even worse, Obama’s thugs may show up at your door to get a more accurate count.

Why wait for the third installment of the Twilight franchise when you’ve got these scary bloodsuckers wanting to … gulp … count you?

To hear Beck tell it, the Census is just part of the “modern day slave state.” Hardly surprising for a man who has called President Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people” and claimed Obama’s policies in general are driven by little more than “reparations” and a desire to “settle old racial scores.”

For government-haters like Beck, attacks such as these are as calculated as they are mean-spirited. Why would he want his audience to think highly of the once-a-decade count if it has a direct result in determining just how federal money for schools, hospitals, job training centers, senior centers, emergency services and a host of public works projects are allocated? He doesn’t believe the federal
government should be involved in these programs in the first place…

[continues in Media Matters]

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We are VERY excited about having Dr. Michael Heiser on the show tonight! Mike Heiser earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. Before attending the UW-Madison, Mike earned an M.A. in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania (major fields: Ancient Israel and Egyptology).

Mike’s main research interests are Israelite religion (especially Israel’s divine council), biblical theology, ancient Near Eastern religion, biblical languages, ancient Semitic languages, the history of the biblical texts, and ancient Jewish binitarian monotheism.

We talk with Dr. Heiser about his work on The Divine Council and UFOs. Is there a pantheon of gods in the Old Testament? Listen and find out.

Learn more about Dr. Heiser at www.drmsh.com and www.thedivinecouncil.com.

California police department on alert for deadly traps.

Police in this picturesque city in rural Riverside County have been on edge in recent weeks. Someone is trying to kill them.

First, a natural gas pipe was shoved through a hole drilled into the roof of the gang enforcement unit’s headquarters. The building filled with flammable vapor but an officer smelled the danger before anyone was hurt.

“It would have taken out half a city block,” Capt. Tony Marghis said.

Then, a ballistic contraption was attached to a sliding security fence around the building. An officer opening the black steel gate triggered the mechanism, which sent a bullet within eight inches of his face.

In another attempted booby trap attack, some kind of explosive device was attached to a police officer’s unmarked car while he went into a convenience store.

Read More on Salon

Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.

Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

“He was over, finished, completely destroyed!” Mr Edamaruku chuckles triumphantly as he concludes the tale in the Rationalist Centre, his second-floor office in the

[Read more at the Times Online]

Is a crusading French documentary maker striking a blow at the abusive powers of television — or simply taking reality TV to a new low of cynicism and bad taste? That’s the question viewers across France are asking in light of Christophe Nick’s new film Game of Death, which aired on French television Wednesday night. The documentary has generated a massive amount of attention — and naturally, courted controversy — because of the dilemma that faced contestants on a fake game show in the film: Would they allow themselves to be cajoled into delivering near-lethal electrical charges to fellow players, or rather follow their better instincts and refuse?

Game of Death is an adaptation of an infamous experiment conducted by a team led by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. In order to test people’s obedience to authority figures, the scientists demanded that subjects administer increasingly strong electric shocks to other participants if they answered questions incorrectly. The people delivering the shocks, however, didn’t know that the charges were fake — the volunteers on the other end of the room were actors pretending to suffer agonizing pain. The point was to see how many people would continue following orders to mete out torture.

Milgram found that 62.5% of his subjects could be encouraged, browbeaten or intimidated into seeing the test through to its conclusion by delivering scores of shocks of increasing intensity to the maximum of 450 volts. In Game of Death, 81% of contestants went all the way by administering more than 20 shocks up to a maximum of 460 volts. Only 16 of the 80 subjects recruited for the fake game show refused the verbal prodding from the host — and pressure from the audience to keep dishing out the torture like a good sport — though most expressed misgivings or tried to pull out before being convinced otherwise.

[Read more at Yahoo News]

It’s a safe bet that the millions of Americans who have recently changed their minds about global warming — deciding it isn’t happening, or isn’t due to human activities such as burning coal and oil, or isn’t a serious threat — didn’t just spend an intense few days poring over climate-change studies and decide, holy cow, the discretization of continuous equations in general circulation models is completely wrong!

Instead, the backlash (an 18-point rise since 2006 in the percentage who say the risk of climate change is exaggerated, Gallup found this month) has been stoked by scientists’ abysmal communication skills, plus some peculiarly American attitudes, both brought into play now by how critics have spun the “Climategate” e-mails to make it seem as if scientists have pulled a fast one.

Scientists are lousy communicators. They appeal to people’s heads, not their hearts or guts, argues Randy Olson, who left a professorship in marine biology to make science films. “Scientists think of themselves as guardians of truth,” he says. “Once they have spewed it out, they feel the burden is on the audience to understand it” and agree.

[Read more at Newsweek]

My grandfather was a hired gun for a rail road which has long since gone out of business. After returning from World War I, he found employment with the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1920’s.

Hired gun is an accurate description of law enforcement in those days. Most people “learn” their history from movies and television. Hollywood’s historical timeline seems to end with Westerns depicting the era of the great cattle drives of the later 1800s and pick up again with depression era gangster movies and the ubiquitous obligatory Irish cop.

Combine all that with most Hollywood writers being from New York and in the business to entertain and not inform and we have a very uninformed populace.

Contrary to the myth of the Wild West, which was never very wild, there were more gunfights in the twenty year run of the old television series “Gun Smoke” than there were in all of the Western states combined for the period depicted. And in Hollywood’s version of history, men stopped carrying guns at the end of the 1880s The only people who carried guns after that were cops and robbers.

[Read more at the Examiner]

A prominent gay rights advocate and soldier being discharged under the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay members of the military from serving openly was arrested after chaining himself to the fence of the White House Thursday.The Advocate notes:

Following a Human Rights Campaign rally for DADT repeal at Freedom Plaza in Washington, Choi and Pietrangelo led about 100 protesters to the White House, where the two then proceeded to handcuff themselves to the gates. Pietrangelo was discharged from the military under the gay ban, while Choi’s discharge is pending. Choi is the founder of Knights Out, a West Point alumni organization supporting LGBT soldiers.

United States Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser told The Advocate that both men were taken to Park Police’s Anacostia station for processing, where they were charged with failure to obey a lawful order. Choi and Pietrangelo will be held overnight and are scheduled to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday.

Choi told rally attendees, according to the report: “You’ve been told that the White House has a plan. But we learned this week that the president is still not fully committed. … Following this rally, I will be leading [the protest] to the White House to say ‘enough talk.’ … I am still standing, I am still fighting, I am still speaking out, and I am still gay.”

[Read more at the Raw Story]

Three people who died in an Arizona sweat lodge in 2009 succumbed to heat stroke and hyperthermia, medical reports indicated.Kirby Brown, 38, of New York; James Shore, 40, of Wisconsin; and Lizbeth Neuman, 49, of Minnesota were guests along with about 60 others at motivational speaker James A. Ray’s retreat near Sedona when they became ill during a “Spiritual Warrior” session in the sweat lodge Oct. 8, 2009.

Brown and Shore died of heat stroke shortly after emergency medical technicians arrived on the scene, the Arizona Republic reported.

Neuman’s death a few days later was caused by “multisystem organ failure due to hyperthermia due to prolonged sweat lodge exposure,” the autopsy, released Tuesday, concluded.

[Read more at UPI.com]

Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont received the first Social Security payment on January 31, 1940.

I have never had any expectations I that ever will collect Social Security … let’s see how Congress deals with this crisis (again). This entitlement system (from an accounting standpoint) sure does hope you die before you get old…

STEPHEN OHLEMACHER writes on the AP via Yahoo News:

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It’s time to start cashing them in.

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

Read More on the AP via Yahoo News

NPR discusses the intimate link between sex and technology — how Internet porn kingpins shaped the web as we know it today and introduced some of the technologies we now take for granted:

Coopersmith says America Online’s popularity was driven by its private chat features. “One of the nicknames for AOL in the industry was ‘the house that sex chat built,’ ” he says.

Adult sites also paved the way for the mainstream to adopt several technologies. They were among the first to integrate e-commerce systems to process credit card transactions. “The first part of the Web to make money was pornography,” Coopersmith says.

“You have a lot of some of the tactics, concepts and business strategies pioneered by the cybersex world that then flowed into the regular online world…For instance, creating these Web sites where you join for a fee and you have different levels of membership.”

More obnoxious practices were also readily embraced by some in the adult world, as many people’s junk e-mail folders can easily demonstrate.

CAMPO, Calif.—Jim Wood doesn’t think the U.S. government is adequately guarding the border with Mexico here. So he has taken on the job himself.

While the federal government fumbles with mishaps and delays in the so-called virtual fence—a network of cameras, sensors and radar that has cost more than $600 million—Mr. Wood is installing his own surveillance system with equipment from Fry’s Electronics and eBay.

The decision by the Department of Homeland Security to freeze funding for the federal project this week only intensified his sense of mission. “As a nonprofit, we’re far more efficient than them,” he said.

The 45-year-old Web developer has set up 20 cameras at a private ranch here, 50 miles east of San Diego. He wants to eventually over the roughly 2,000 miles from Texas to California.

But if the goal is to show up the government, it isn’t working as Mr. Wood planned, thanks to the border’s tough weather and vast wilderness.

On a recent rainy afternoon, 16 of Mr. Wood’s cameras, which run on solar power, were down; the water had disabled two of the remaining four. The motion detector was off because it was mostly triggered by wind-stirred vegetation, not illegal crossers.

Similar snags prompted Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Tuesday to divert some of the federal project’s funding towards more practical tools, such as mobile radios and laptops. With the exception of a small section in Arizona currently being tested, spending on the ambitious border-long system is on hold until a review she ordered in January is completed…

In a scene reminiscent of non-violent civil rights confrontations from the 1960s, Ohio Tea Partiers quickly turned ugly when facing off with health care advocates in front of Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s office Tuesday.

In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson’s disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, “I’ll decide when to give you money!”

See and read more on the Columbus Dispatch

Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

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The United Nations’ International Labor Organization has revealed some horrifying stats:

The ILO estimates that approximately two million workers lose their lives annually due to occupational injuries and illnesses, with accidents causing at least 350,000 deaths a year. For every fatal accident, there are an estimated 1,000 non-fatal injuries, many of which result in lost earnings, permanent disability and poverty.

The death toll at work, much of which is attributable to unsafe working practices, is the equivalent of 5,000 workers dying each day, three persons every minute. This is more than double the figure for deaths from warfare (650,000 deaths per year). According to the ILO’s SafeWork programme, work kills more people than alcohol and drugs together and the resulting loss in Gross Domestic Product is 20 times greater than all official development assistance to the developing countries.

Each year, 6,570 US workers die because of injuries at work, while 60,225 meet their maker due to occupational diseases. (Meanwhile, 13.2 million get hurt, and 1.1 million develop illnesses that don’t kill them.) On an average day, two or three workers are fatally shot, two fall to their deaths, one is killed after being smashed by a vehicle, and one is electrocuted. Each year, around 30 workers die of heat stroke, and another 30 expire from carbon monoxide.

Although blue collar workers face a lot of the most obvious dangers, those slaving in offices or stores must contend with toxic air, workplace violence, driving accidents, and (especially for the health-care workers) transmissible diseases. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration warns that poisonous indoor air in nonindustrial workplaces causes “[t]housands of heart disease deaths [and] hundreds of lung cancer deaths” each year.

But hey, everybody has to go sometime, right? And since we spend so much of our lives in the workplace, it’s only logical that a lot of deaths happen — or at least are set into motion — on the job. This explanation certainly is true to an extent, but it doesn’t excuse all such deaths. The International Labor Organization says that half of workplace fatalities are avoidable. In A Job to Die For, Lisa Cullen writes:

In the workplace, few real accidents occur because the surroundings and operations are known; therefore, hazards can be identified. When harm from those hazards can be foreseen, accidents can be prevented….

Most jobs have expected, known hazards. Working in and near excavations, for example, poses the obvious risks of death or injury from cave-in …. When trenches or excavations collapse because soil was piled right up to the edge, there is little room to claim it was an accident.

References: International Labor Organization. “Workers’ Memorial Day Ceremony to Focus on Emergency Workers, Firefighters.” Press release, 24 Apr 2002. • Cullen, Lisa. A Job to Die For: Why So Many Americans Are Killed, Injured or Made Ill at Work and What to Do About It. Common Courage Press, 2002. This book uses the following as its sources for the US statistics I’ve cited: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Costs of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses by J. Paul Leigh (University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.