I know what you did last summer!!

A CBS News producer charged with trying to extort $2 million from David Letterman in a plot that prompted the late-night comedian to admit to sexual relationships with employees was desperate and deep in debt, prosecutors said.

Robert (Joe) Halderman [ Top left picture ], is accused of demanding the lump sum in exchange for not releasing information that would ruin Letterman's reputation. Letterman told millions of viewers on his show Thursday the threat concerned sexual liaisons with women who work for him.

Giant rat species discovered

Scientists have discovered a new species of giant rat in a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea. The newly discovered rat is similar in size and weight to this one found by scientists in 2007. Measuring 82 centimeters (32.2 inches) from nose to tail and weighing around 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds), the species is thought to be one of the largest rats ever to be found.

The discovery was made by a team from the BBC Natural History Unit inside the crater of Mount Bosavi -- an extinct volcano in the Southern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea.
"This is one of the world's largest rats. It's a true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers," said Kristofer Helgen, a biologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who was part of the expedition team.

Initial examinations of the rat -- provisionally named the Bosavi woolly rat -- suggest that it belongs to the Mallomys -- a genus of rodents in the muridae family which are the largest living species of rodent.

Have You Read The Komada Awards?

Kim Komada of Rancho Palos Verdes, California was assisting Mark Scrivens back his boat into the driveway of her in-laws’ home. Wearing flip flops, she used her foot for traction against the boat and slipped and fell down a flight of stairs, breaking her right foot.

She sued her in-laws, claiming that the steps were slippery and were missing a handrail. The defense asserted that "the handrail may not have prevented injury, because, according to building code, it could have been placed on either side of the stairway." The defense also played a tape from an answering machine message Komada left saying "It was just me being stupid," presumably before she hired a lawyer. The jury agreed and found the defendant not responsible for damages.

SuperSonic BOOM

The breaking of the sound barrier is not just an audible phenomenon. As a new picture from the U.S. military shows, Mach 1 can be quite visual. This widely circulated new photo shows a Air Force F-22 Raptor aircraft participating in an exercise in the Gulf of Alaska June 22, 2009 as it executes a supersonic flyby over the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis.

The visual phenomenon, which sometimes but not always accompanies the breaking of the sound barrier, has also been seen with nuclear blasts and just after space shuttles launches, too. A vapor cone was photographed as the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission rocketed skyward in 1969.
The phenomenon is not well studied. Scientists refer to it as a vapor cone, shock collar, or shock egg, and it's thought to be created by what's called a Prandtl-Glauert singularity.

Here's what scientists think happens:

A layer of water droplets gets trapped between two high-pressure surfaces of air. In humid conditions, condensation can gather in the trough between two crests of the sound waves produced by the jet. This effect does not necessarily coincide with the breaking of the sound barrier, although it can

Michael Jackson dies in UCLA

Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon at his Holmby Hills home and paramedics were unable to revive him. We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.A source tells us Jackson was dead when paramedics arrived.

A cardiologist at UCLA tells us that Jackson died of cardiac arrest.Once at the hospital, the staff tried to resuscitate him but he was completely unresponsive.A source inside the hospital told us there was "absolute chaos" after Jackson arrrived. People who were with the singer were screaming, "You've got to save him! You've got to save him!"

Space rocks coming for Earth

A storm of meteorites that pounded Earth and Mars four billion years ago may have made the planets warmer and wetter. Researchers superheated younger space rocks to measure the gases that would have been shed as meteorites entered fledgling atmospheres during the storm.

There would have been enough to create warmer and wetter planets more amenable to life, they say. The researchers found that an average fragment gave up 12% of its mass as water vapour and 6% as carbon dioxide. Based on published estimates of the number of LHB impacts, the researchers believe 10 billion tonnes of water and carbon dioxide would have been brought to the Earth and Mars each year. That in turn would have led to global warming, liquid oceans, and a more habitable environment, they suggest.

GM Is Gone!

Economists agreed Monday that the bankruptcy filing of the once-mighty General Motors Corp. will be a blow to the American economy. The filing comes at the same time the economy was starting to show glimmers of hope with the rate of economic decline slowing and consumer confidence rebounding, economists said.

You don't go broke because you're bankrupt. You go bankrupt because you're broke. If GM moves quickly and restructures as a smaller, viable company, the sickness might be acute, but not chronic. But will they... a simple fact that is not in main media, is that GM owns huge factories outside of US and they have been investing money in to them.. money that they dont bring to the US and money they dont pay US tax on... bastards!!!

In fact here is a Brief history of GM as stated in Yahoo Finance.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/A-brief-history-of-General-apf-15402718.html?.v=2

With a bankruptcy filing, the pain might be felt all at once rather than GM spiraling toward death over the next god knows how many years....

Credit Cards are the Problem

Every American with a credit card will see sweeping changes in the market, with limits on sudden hikes in interest rates that drive consumers deeper into debt. Even cardholders who pay off their balance each month may face new annual fees or lose out on lucrative rewards programs.

Congress wrapped up the legislation Wednesday and sent it to President Barack Obama, who plans to sign it on Friday. The bill will revolutionize the market by restricting when and how a card company can raise an individual's interest rate, who can receive a card and how much time people are given to pay their bill.

In general, the new rules — which go into effect in nine months — will protect debt-ridden consumers from many of the surprise charges common in the industry, such as over-the-limit fees and costs for paying a bill by phone.
So kiss my ass american express and bank of america and the rest of you.. your time is coming!!

I think i Found a Dodo

Adventurers exploring a cave on an island in the Indian Ocean have discovered the most complete and well-preserved dodo skeleton ever found, scientists reported yesterday.

Very little has been known about the dodo—from what exactly it looked like to what it ate—since it became extinct in the 1600s. The new skeleton is thought to be complete and was likely preserved by its cave setting. The cavers found the remains off the coast of Africa on Mauritius, the only island were dodos were known to have lived

The discovery was made last month, but its location was kept secret until the skeleton was completely recovered. Nicknamed Fred after the caver who found the bones, the bird was kept under guard while the recovery took place, according to press reports.

My Neighbor is a Hobbit

Scientists have found skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human that grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child (See pictures). The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits, lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia 18,000 years ago.

Australian and Indonesian researchers discovered bones of the miniature humans in a cave on Flores, an island east of Bali and midway between Asia and Australia. Scientists have determined that the first skeleton they found belongs to a species of human completely new to science. Named Homo floresiensis, after the island on which it was found, the tiny human has also been dubbed by dig workers as the "hobbit," after the tiny creatures from the Lord of the Rings books.

The original skeleton, a female, stood at just 1 meter (3.3 feet) tall, weighed about 25 kilograms (55 pounds), and was around 30 years old at the time of her death 18,000 years ago. The skeleton was found in the same sediment deposits on Flores that have also been found to contain stone tools and the bones of dwarf elephants, giant rodents, and Komodo dragons, lizards that can grow to 10 feet (3 meters) and that still live today. Homo floresienses has been described as one of the most spectacular discoveries in paleoanthropology in half a century—and the most extreme human ever discovered.

Thats Enough Google!

Benjamin Edelman, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, claims Google and partners are inflating PPC conversion rates and increasing advertiser cost via four specific channels, including Google's own Chrome browser.
Google makes money by charging advertisers every time a user clicks on a Google advertisement, but in the instances described and documented by Edelman, he makes it appear Google and partners are colluding to intercept traffic to websites that would be navigated directly (and for free) rather than by searching.

Edelman's claims, presented as they are, seem damning at first glance, but at times the connections seem tenuous and would carry a certain amount of deniability on Google's part for they all involve third party actions, even if they benefit Google end. Google would not comment on third party/affiliate actions or motivations, so the links and proffered proofs are left to us (via Edelman) to consider. Google also declined to comment about the autocomplete feature on Chrome and whether it is designed to encourage search and discourage direct navigation.

As it turns out, Google and its partners systematically inflate advertisers' conversion rates by interceding in transactions advertisers would otherwise have received for free. This conversion-inflation syndication fraud overstates the true effectiveness of the ads Google delivers -- leading advertisers to pay more than they should.

Bermuda Traingle - Fiction or Fact?

The Bermuda Triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean where some people believe that mysterious, paranormal, or supernatural events occur. Traditionally, it is a roughly equilateral triangle whose vertices are Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and the southern tip of Florida.

The mysterious nature of the Bermuda Triangle, if it exists, manifests itself as an unusually high rate of disappearances of aircraft and marine vessels in the area. Among the more highly publicized events are:

The disappearance of Navy Flight 19 on December 5, 1945 (and the Martin Mariner rescue plane sent out to find it)
A pair of Avro Tudor IV passenger aircraft; the Star Tiger was lost on January 30, 1948, the Star Ariel was lost on January 17, 1949
The disappearance of the SS Marine Sulphur Queen on February 4, 1963
The paranormal experience of airplane pilot Chuck Wakely in 1964
The disappearance of expert yachtsman Donald Crowhurst on June 29, 1969

Before attempting to explain the high levels of disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle, it is necessary to ascertain whether there really is such a thing. This area is one of the busiest shipping areas in the world, so a correspondingly higher level of typical ship disappearances would be expected. The Southeast coast of the US is also prone to violent storms, suggesting that a more frequent occurrence of non-supernatural disappearances would be expected.

It turns out that the Bermuda Triangle is no more dangerous than other similarly storm-prone areas. Heavier traffic in the area corresponds to a higher number of disappearances. Moreover, insurance rates for shipping and travel within the Bermuda Triangle are no higher than anywhere else.