Category Archives: Entertainment

Talk Show Host Rob Simone joins the team on the Travel Channel ‘s Hit Show “Mystery at the Museum”

On June 12th, Talk Show Host Rob Simone joins the team on the Travel Channel ‘s
Hit Show “Mystery at the Museum”

Rob Simone, who is a guest host on America’s most listened to overnight talk show,
Coast to Coast AM, Simulcast on over 560 radio stations nation-wide, talks about
the Bermuda Triangle and the mysterious disappearance of “Flight 19.”

More at: www.RobSimone.com

This fascinating program displays its wondrous treasures of the past — often strange and curious remnants of the momentous events that have shaped our history. Behind each artifact is yet another story to be told and secrets to be revealed — tales brimming with scandal, mystery, murder and intrigue.

Each hour of this series will take viewers on a captivating, revealing and at times shocking tour of America’s past, revisiting its most crucial events by reexamining what has been left behind. The series casts its net wide, exploring the corners and backrooms of institutions dedicated to a variety of popular and entertaining subjects — invisible spies, cold-blooded assassins, dinosaurs, the paranormal, the Old West, the Cold War and more.

Tune in:June 12th, 8pm EST – The Travel Channel

Mitt Romney receives 1 million dollars from a “mysterious” corporation

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Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign could face sharp questions after an independent political committee supporting him accepted a whopping $1 million from a company that vanished into thin air, campaign finance watchdogs said yesterday.

The mysterious company, W Spann LLC, was created by a lawyer at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray and then folded shortly after the donation was made, according to NBC News. That move may indicate a “sham organization” created to shield Romney’s financial supporters, said Michael Beckel, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that examines campaign donation records.

“There’s serious potential for blowback (against Romney),” Beckel warned. “Former Romney aides are involved in this group — so even if they are independent, it’s not like they’re strangers.”

Yesterday, a Romney spokeswoman said the campaign has no connection to the so-called SuperPAC, Restore Our Future, created by Charles Spies, Romney’s former general counsel in 2008, his former political director Carl Forti and former spokesman Larry McCarthy.

The PAC raised $12.2 million during the first six months of 2011 and has publicly said it’s backing Romney, but it is not officially connected to Romney’s campaign and can receive unlimited funds from individuals and corporations because of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that removed a ban on corporate political donations.

W Spann LLC was incorporated in Delaware in March and made a $1 million contribution to Restore Our Future on April 28, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. The company folded on July 12, two weeks before the PAC made its first disclosure of its donors this year.

NBC News, which first reported the donation, said a Boston lawyer, Cameron Casey of Ropes & Gray, formed the company. Casey did not return calls for comment.

Brittany Gross, spokeswoman for Restore Our Future, declined to say whether PAC officials asked for identifying information from W Spann LLC. She referred to a statement that said PAC officials followed federal election laws.

Paul Ryan, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said federal election and justice officials should determine if the donation broke campaign laws.

“Just because the general public doesn’t know where money comes from doesn’t mean that Mitt Romney doesn’t know or that Mitt Romney’s SuperPAC doesn’t know,” Ryan said. “These sorts of practices deprive the voting public of valuable information as to who is trying to influence a candidate with million-dollar checks.”



F.B.I. seizes web servers, knocks sites offline without warrent (video)

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F.B.I. seizes web servers, knocks sites offline without warrent (video)

The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline.

The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.

In an e-mail to one of its clients on Tuesday afternoon, a DigitalOne employee, Sergej Ostroumow, said: “This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we can not check it.”

Mr. Ostroumow said that the F.B.I. was only interested in one of the company’s clients but had taken servers used by “tens of clients.” He wrote: “After F.B.I.’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our website is offline and support doesn’t work.” The company’s staff had been working to solve the problem for the previous 15 hours, he said.

Mr. Ostroumow said in response to e-mailed questions that it was not clear if the issues would be resolved by Wednesday.

It is not clear what the F.B.I. was looking for, or whether the raid was in response to recent attacks by hacker groups on corporate and government sites.

A government official who declined to be named said earlier in the day that the F.B.I. was actively investigating the Lulz Security group and any affiliated hackers. The official said the F.B.I. had teamed up with other agencies in this effort, including the Central Intelligence Agency and cybercrime bureaus in Europe.

The sites of the Curbed Network, including popular blogs covering real estate, restaurants and other topics, were all unavailable Tuesday evening. Lockhart Steele, Curbed’s president, said his team realized that the company’s sites were down at around 3 a.m. and contacted DigitalOne. After initially declining to say what had happened, DigitalOne explained that the F.B.I. had raided the data center, Mr. Steele said.

“Our servers happened to be in with some naughty servers,” he said, adding that his sites were not the target of the raid. Curbed is working to get its sites back online, probably by Wednesday.

The raid also affected a server used by Instapaper, a popular service that saves articles for later reading. Marco Arment, Instapaper’s founder, said he lost contact with a server hosted by DigitalOne early on Tuesday. Instapaper’s Web site is still operating but has slowed somewhat. Mr. Arment said he had not heard from DigitalOne or law enforcement, and had no reason to believe that Instapaper was a target of the raid.

Pinboard, a bookmarking site, was operating on a backup server and some of its features were turned off, a post on its site said.

DigitalOne provided all necessary information to pinpoint the servers for a specific I.P. address, Mr. Ostroumow said. However, the agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that “one enclosure is = to one server,” he said in an e-mail.

DigitalOne had no employees on-site when the raid took place. The data center operator, from which DigitalOne leases space, passed along the information about the raid three hours after it started with the name of the agent and a phone number to call.

Before learning of the raid, Mr. Ostroumow, who is in Switzerland with the rest of his team, thought the problem was a technical glitch.

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source: New York Times

Russia Reveals A Cold War Laser That Can Targets U.S. Satellites (Video)

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Back in 1981, when Reagan was preparing to spend the Soviet Union into the ground, the U.S. developed an Airborne Laser Laboratory that could bring down missiles and planes with high-density rays.

Never willing to be outdone, the Soviets launched the Beriev A-60, a jumbo-jet with a laser cannon installed in the nose.

Only two Beriev’s were ever completed and U.S. intelligence officials never grew concerned as one was destroyed and the other was put into storage without so much as a test flight.

A few years ago, the Russians dusted the wings off of the stored plane and renewed their modifications.

According to The Space Review, the new design lacks the nose cannon of its predecessor and has its laser mounted up away from the earth and directed toward space (via Danger Room).

Danger Room also points to a statement issued by the Russians last year that says they’re developing an “air-laser system designed to transmit laser energy to remote sites in order to counter the infrared opto-electronic tools of the enemy.”

A large bulge on the back of the craft is an overhead port that opens to deploy the 1-megawatt laser turret with a range of 190 to 370 miles.

An aviation photography team from Russian Planes was able to pick up the the insignia on the laser-equipped jet that shows a tapering red beam shooting into space at the Hubble Telescope. The Hubble represents U.S. satellites, and it’s path of motion is blacked out over Russia (see picture above).

The concept of directing a laser at orbiting assets is nothing new. In 2006, China hit American satellites with lasers from a ground based installation, possibly blinding them.

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ET LIFE: NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical!

No, NASA has not found life on another planet, but has found life here on Earth that is almost “alien” to our narrow, phosphate-based view of life. Scientists have discovered — or “trained,” actually — a type of bacteria that can live and grow almost entirely on a poison, arsenic, and incorporates it into its DNA. This “weird” form of life, which can use something other than phosphorus — what we think of as a basic building block of life — is quite different from what we think of as life on Earth. It doesn’t directly provide proof of a “shadow biosphere,” a second form of life that lives side-by-side with other life on our planet, but does suggest that the requirements for life’s beginnings and foundations may be more flexible than we thought. This means life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond could arise in a multitude of conditions.

“Our findings are a reminder that life-as-we-know-it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” said Felise Wolfe-Simon, lead author of a new paper in Science. “If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?”

The salt-loving bacteria, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria,came from the toxic and briny Mono Lake, near Yosemite Park in California. The lake has no outlet, so over millennia has become one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth.

Although the bacteria did not subsist entirely on arsenic in the lake, the researchers took the bacteria in the lab grew it in Petri dishes in which phosphate salt was gradually replaced by arsenic, until the bacteria could grow without needing phosphate, an essential building block for various macromolecules present in all cells, including nucleic acids, lipids and proteins.

Using radio-tracers, the team closely followed the path of arsenic in the bacteria; from the chemical’s uptake to its incorporation into various cellular components. Arsenic had completely replaced phosphate in the molecules of the bacteria, right down its DNA.

“Life as we know it requires particular chemical elements and excludes others,” said Ariel Anbar, a biogeochemist and astrobiologist from Arizona State University. “But are those the only options? How different could life be? One of the guiding principles in the search for life on other planets, and of our astrobiology program, is that we should ‘follow the elements. Felisa’s study teaches us that we ought to think harder about which elements to follow.”

Wolfe-Simon added, “We took what we do know about the ‘constants’ in biology, specifically that life requires the six elements CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur) in three components, namely DNA, proteins and fats, and used that as a basis to ask experimentally testable hypotheses even here on Earth.”

The idea that arsenic might be a substitute for phosphorus in life on Earth, was proposed by Wolfe-Simon and developed into a collaboration with Anbar and theoretical physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies. Their hypothesis was published in January 2009, in a paper titled “Did nature also choose arsenic?” in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

“We not only hypothesized that biochemical systems analogous to those known today could utilize arsenate in the equivalent biological role as phosphate,” said Wolfe-Simon “but also that such organisms could have evolved on the ancient Earth and might persist in unusual environments today.”

This new research is the first time that shows a microorganism is able to use a toxic chemical to sustain growth and life.

HIGHLIGHTS – Latest WikiLeaks developments

LONDON (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he and his colleagues are taking steps to protect themselves after death threats following the publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables on their website.

WikiLeaks moved its website address to the Swiss http://wikileaks.ch on Friday after two U.S. Internet providers ditched it and Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting its database of leaked information.

Swedish authorities said missing information in the European arrest warrant for alleged sex crimes against Assange had been handed to British authorities.

Here are some of the latest revelations in U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks and related stories:

MIDEAST

– Top U.S. officials have grown frustrated over the resistance of allies in the Middle East to help shut the financial pipeline of terrorists.

CHINA

– The hacking of Google Inc that led the Internet company to briefly pull out of China was orchestrated by two members of China’s top ruling body.

IRAN

– The WikiLeaks publication of secret cables was not the embarrassing blow to U.S. diplomacy many people assume, but a deliberate ploy by Washington to improve its image, a senior Iranian official said.

– Iran told Gulf Arab states it was not a threat and wanted cooperation, in an apparent attempt to lower tensions after WikiLeaks revelations that Gulf Arab leaders are deeply anxious about its nuclear program.

AUSTRALIA

– Australian police are investigating whether WikiLeaks’ Australian founder, Julian Assange, has broken any of the country’s laws and is liable to prosecution there, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said.

LIBYA

– Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi caused a month-long nuclear scare in 2009 when he delayed the return to Russia of radioactive material in an apparent fit of diplomatic pique, leaked U.S. embassy cables showed.

GERMANY

– A top official in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives said he was shocked how sloppily the United States policed sensitive data and that it had failed to live up to its responsibilities as a global power.

AFGHANISTAN

– Leaked U.S. government cables critical of Afghanistan and Pakistan have helped bring the two nations together, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said, dismissing their content as lies.

– Afghanistan’s finance minister offered to resign over a leaked U.S. cable which reported him as describing President Hamid Karzai as a “weak man” and said ties with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were damaged.

– British troops were “not up” to the task of securing Afghanistan’s Helmand province and the governor pleaded for U.S. reinforcements, American diplomats said.

EGYPT

– President Hosni Mubarak warned U.S. officials Egypt might develop nuclear weapons if Iran obtained them. A U.S. ambassador described Egypt, recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid since making peace with Israel in 1979, as a “stubborn and recalcitrant ally” in a February 2009 cable.

Egypt lobbied last year to delay southern Sudan’s secession vote for 4-6 years because it feared the division could imperil its share of Nile waters.

ITALY

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dismissed reports of U.S. worries over his ties with Moscow and repeated he had never profited personally from his contacts.

LEBANON

U.S. spy planes flew reconnaissance flights over Lebanon from a British air base in Cyprus in a counter-terrorist operation requested by Lebanese officials.

MEXICO

– A Mexican official said the government was in danger of losing control of parts of the country to powerful drug cartels.

RUSSIA

– President Dmitry Medvedev said the leaks showed the “cynicism” of U.S. diplomacy but suggested they would not seriously upset improving ties with Washington.

TURKMENISTAN

– Turkmenistan’s leader is described as “not very bright” and “a practiced liar” in a cable from the U.S. embassy in the gas-rich Central Asian state. It said President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov did not like the United States, Iran or Turkey, but was fond of China.

UNITED NATIONS

– The CIA prepared a list of the kinds of information on U.N. officials and diplomats that it wanted U.S. envoys in New York and around the world to gather.

VENEZUELA

– Cuban intelligence services directly advised Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in what a U.S. diplomat called the “Axis of Mischief,” according to a State Department cable. Other cables revealed U.S. anxiety at Chavez’s “cosiness” with Iran, and concerns of Venezuelan Jews over what they saw as government prejudice against them.

YEMEN

– Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh secretly offered U.S. forces open access to his country to launch attacks against al Qaeda targets.

New Zealand releases UFO files

The reports, dating from 1954 to 2009, were released under freedom of information laws after the New Zealand Defence Force removed names and other identifying material.

In about 2,000 pages of documents, members of the public, military personnel and commercial pilots outline close encounters, mostly involving moving lights in the sky.

Some of the accounts include drawings of flying saucers, descriptions of aliens wearing “pharaoh masks” and alleged examples of extraterrestrial writing.

One of the most comprehensive files concerns two sightings of strange lights off the South Island town of Kaikoura in 1978, one of which was captured by a television crew aboard a plane in the area.

The incident made international headlines at the time but a contemporary Air Force report found it could be explained by natural phenomena such as lights from boats being reflected off clouds or an unusual view of the planet Venus.

T.I. And Tiny Arrested For Alleged Drug Possession In Los Angeles

Rapper and his wife were booked for felony alleged possession of a controlled substance Wednesday night.
By Gil Kaufman





T.I. and Tameka Cottle

Photo: Getty Images

Rapper T.I. and his wife Tameka “Tiny” Cottle were arrested in Los Angeles on Wednesday night for alleged possession of a controlled substance.

According to an arrest report on the incident from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, during the course of a traffic stop involving Tip (born Clifford Harris Jr.), 29, and Cottle, 36, on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood at 10:30 p.m., “deputies smelled a strong odor of marijuana emitting from the vehicle.”

A narcotics investigation followed and both Tiny and T.I. were “found to be in possession of a controlled substance.” At press time, there was no information on which drug the possession charge covered.

TMZ reported that the recently married couple were traveling in a Maybach when they were stopped by deputies.

Both T.I. and Tiny were booked at the West Hollywood sheriff’s station on charges of felony possession of a controlled substance, and bail was set at $10,000 each. Deputy Jeff Gordon confirmed on Thursday morning (September 2) that both had posted bail around 4 a.m. PT and were due back in court on the charges on September 3. A spokesperson for T.I.’s label could not be reached for comment early Thursday morning.

Tip, who celebrated the #1 debut of his film “Takers” last weekend, is on federal probation following a seven-month prison term he completed in March on weapons charges. At press time, Gordon said considering T.I. was allowed to post bail on the drug charge, it did not appear that the rapper’s probation from the federal charge would be impacted by Wednesday night’s arrest.

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