An Amtrak train crashed into another train unloading passengers at a station in California, leaving 16 people with mainly minor injuries, authorities said. The crash occurred late yesterday as the passenger train, traveling at a speed of up to about 20mph, struck the stationary Amtrak train at the station in…
Continue reading …Vikram Pandit, Citigroup CEO: Occupy Wall Street’s Sentiments Are ‘Completely Understandable’
October 13, 2011 No Comment
Vikram Pandit, CEO of one of the most visible Wall Street institutions in Citigroup, said he thinks the sentiments of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are “completely understandable.” “Their sentiments are completely understandable,” Pandit said in an interview Wednesday with Andrew Serwer of Fortune Magazine. “The economic recovery is not what we all want it to be, there are a number of people in our country who cant achieve what they are capable of achieving and that’s not a good place to be.” Demonstrators have been camped out in Manhattan’s financial district since September 17 protesting against income inequality, corporate greed and the power of financial institutions, among other topics. The protests have inspired similar demonstrations across the country. The group in Manhattan took their march to the home of Pandit’s fellow big bank executive Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch Tuesday. They have plans to demonstrate in front of a JPMorgan Chase skyscraper Wednesday. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire himself, said the protesters were wrong to pick on Dimon because he is “honorable and pays his taxes”, according to The New York Observer. But Pandit seems to think they have a point. “I would also corroborate that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S. and that it’s Wall Street’s job to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust,” he said in the interview. “I’d talk about the fact that they should hold Citi and the financial institutions accountable for practicing responsible finance.” Pandit added that he’d “be happy to talk to them anytime,” noting that he would emphasize Citi’s efforts to expand small business lending and their decision not to charge a fee for debit card use. Bank of America announced last month that it would start charging a $5 fee for using a debit card for purchases starting in 2012. Wells Fargo also announced it would test a $3 fee. Pandit isn’t the only famed financier expressing some measure of support for the protesters. George Soros said he sympathizes with the protesters and PIMCO founder Bill Gross said in a tweet Tuesday that the protesters are just “fighting back after 30 years of being shot at.”
Continue reading …Doug Niblack, Surfer, Tells Of Standing On Great White Shark Off Oregon Coast
October 13, 2011 No Comment
– Doug Niblack was trying to catch another wave before going to work, when his longboard hit something hard as rock off the Oregon Coast and he suddenly found himself standing on the back of a thrashing great white shark. Looking down, he could see a dorsal fin in front of his feet as he stood on what he described as 10 feet of back as wide as his surfboard and as black as his own Neoprene wetsuit. A tail thrashed back and forth and the water churned around him like a depth charge went off. “It was pretty terrifying just seeing the shape emerge out of nothing and just being under me,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “And the fin coming out of the water. It was just like the movies.” The several seconds Niblack spent on the back of the great white Monday off Seaside, Ore., was a rare encounter, though not unprecedented, according to Ralph Collier, president of the Shark Research Committee in Canoga Park, Calif., and director of the Global Shark Attack File in Princeton, N.J. He said he spoke to a woman who was kayaking off Catalina Island, Calif., in 2008 when a shark slammed her kayak from underneath and sent her flying into the air. She then landed on the back of the shark, Collier said. “At that point the shark started to swim out to sea, so she jumped off its back,” Collier said. Coast Guard Lt. J.G. Zach Vojtech said officials do not officially log shark encounters, but he had learned about Niblack’s ordeal from an off-duty member who was nearby when he was knocked from his board. Jake Marks, the Coast Guard member, said he never saw the shark, but witnessed Niblack suddenly standing up, with water churning around him. He said joined Niblack in paddling as fast as he could for shore after seeing a large shape swimming off between them just beneath the surface. “I have no reason to doubt there was a shark out there,” said Marks. “With the damage to his board, the way he was yelling and trembling afterwards – there is no other explanation for that.” Niblack figures he was standing on the shark no more than three or four seconds, when the shark went out from beneath him. The dorsal fin caught his board, dragged him three or four feet by his ankle tether. “I’m just screaming bloody murder,” he said. “I’m just yelling, `Shark!’ I thought for sure I was gone.” Before it all happened, he had been spending a couple hours surfing at The Cove, a popular north Oregon Coast surfing spot. He was scheduled to go into work waiting tables later that day. There were about a dozen other people, but most of them went in when the waves started getting big, leaving Niblack with two other guys sitting on their boards about 50 yards from shore. Niblack had paddled out about 20 yards beyond them, when the swell dropped and his board hit something solid. He kicked down with both feet, trying to stand up so he wouldn’t get thrashed by the next wave, and found himself standing knee deep in water too deep for standing. “When I put my hands down on it, it felt rubbery like Neoprene, like a wetsuit,” he said. “There was a moment there when everything was going on, I just kind of made my peace. I honestly thought I was going to die. Then paddling back in, I was praying the whole time. Like, `Don’t let it be following me.’ In six years of surfing, Niblack, who grew up in Yelm, Wash., has seen sharks in the water, but never so close. He was still shaky when he went to work that night, but was better the next night. He has been waking up from vague dreams of sharks, but is planning to go back out to surf. When he does he will take a waterproof video camera his roommate gave him. He also put a sticker on the bottom of his board to ward off sharks – a shark with a red circle and a slash over it. “I’ll definitely go back out,” he said. “It’s just the surf sucks right now. I’ll wait `til that gets better, then go back out.”
Continue reading …Canadian Newspaper’s Hilarious Captions Pair Red Carpet With Real Causes
October 13, 2011 No Comment
This week’s round-up of celebrity photos from Canadian newspaper The Globe & Mail uses captions that hilariously reflect the outrage behind the Occupy Wall Street protests. The photo gallery has gone viral thanks to the snarky captions on images of celebs preening on the red carpet, intermixed with photos of protestors rallying against income disparity
Continue reading …Talk about the break-up from hell: After leather artist Peter Main, 62, parted ways with Toni Jo Silvey, 49, in 2009, she allegedly broke two of his windows with a tire iron and a third with a sword , rammed his parked car with hers and sent it through the garage…
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Uncertainty over who will be deported tempers West Bank mood after deal with Israel to free Gilad Shalit When the news came through that the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was to be released, a wave of relief spread across the West Bank. There are currently around 7,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, of whom 180 are children. And this Saturday, 1,026 families will hear whether their husband, wife, child or sister will be among the prisoners Israel will free in return for its captive sergeant. The wait is fraught with hope and anxiety. Among those due to be released are people convicted of mass murders, but there are also those who were simply members of organisations banned by Israel, or who threw rocks at Israeli soldiers. Mohamed Tamimi, 36, has not seen his sister Ahlan since four years ago, when he was last granted a permit to see her in prison. Ahlan is serving 16 life sentences for driving a suicide bomber to a Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001. The blast killed 15 people and injured 130, in one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Israel’s history. She is reported to be among those marked for release, but her family knows nothing for certain. As news reports say she will be sent to Jordan, Mohamed is preparing to travel there this weekend. “It’s been a very tense week,” he said. “I still don’t know anything. News reports say she is going to be deported to Jordan, but I still don’t know if she’ll be going there or some other country. I have no idea what visas I’m going to need.” Ahlan was arrested when she was 22 years old, during the height of the intifada. Mohamed said her involvement in the bombing came as a huge shock to her family. He assumed Hamas recruited her at Bir Zeit University, where she was studying journalism. She was a perfect target, he said – she did not wear a headscarf and spoke fluent English, so would have aroused little suspicion from Israeli soldiers: “I don’t want to justify her actions. She has a deep connection with this land, she wanted to be part of the resistance. There was so much pressure on us at that time, so much death, frustration – but really, I don’t think she fully thought through what she was doing.”On Thursday a small group of protesters staged a demonstration in Ramallah’s Manara Square, linked in prisoner’s chains in solidarity with the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israel’s jails. Among the demonstrators was Hassan Karaja, whose sister Sumoud is among the hunger strikers. Hassan said Sumoud, who taught health and nutrition, was imprisoned for attempting to cross from Ramallah into Jerusalem without the permit required by West Bank inhabitants. Israel accused her of stabbing an Israeli soldier at Qalandiya checkpoint and earlier this year she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. “She wasn’t trying to do anything that wasn’t her right,” said Karaja, 26. “I am very happy – I am sure she will soon be free. It’s important for her to complete her education. But I’m very sad for the families of prisoners who will stay in jail and for those who will be deported to Gaza, Egypt, Jordan and who knows where.” Israeli authorities have confirmed that 203 of the first 450 prisoners to be released will be sent abroad. A total of 110 of those are from the West Bank. Ahlan Tamimi is now 31, and Mohamed hopes she will be able to start a new life, with political activism behind her. She had wanted to become a journalist and was an honours student at Bir Zeit. Ahlan’s fiance, Nizar Tamimi, is also in prison, accused of killing a settler in the West Bank. It is still not clear whether he will be freed next week “My father and I want to see Ahlan in a white veil getting married. I want to see her children call me uncle,” said Mohamed. “But as happy as we are about this deal, it is not a complete happiness. Deportation will be so painful for Ahlan. I don’t know how she will cope with being banished from the land she is so devoted to.” Palestinian territories Gilad Shalit Israel Middle East Phoebe Greenwood guardian.co.uk
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While Discovery Channel’s “MythBusters” has seen to it that we no longer believe in goldfish with three-second memory spans or life-threatening quicksand à la “Tarzan,” bar-room discussions are still filled with false facts and improbable ideas. To bolster your conversation, not to mention your “Jeopardy” skills, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson have compiled “The Second Book of General Ignorance,” a comprehensive collection of refuted general knowledge. Here are 11 facts from the book that you’ll be surprised you didn’t know: Reprinted from The Second Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is (Still) Wrong Copyright (c) 2011 by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. Published by the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Continue reading …Bill O’Reilly, Tavis Smiley And Cornel West Have Fiery Clash Over Wall Street, Poverty
October 13, 2011 No Comment
Bill O’Reilly welcomed radio host Tavis Smiley and Prof. Cornel West onto his Tuesday show. The resulting dust-up was nothing short of a cable news classic. Smiley and West have become a bona fide double act, regularly making the cable news rounds. O’Reilly brought them on to discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement and poverty in America. He set up the conversation by saying that the two were overlooking key statistics in their battle against poverty that showed the problem to be as much one of “personal responsibility” as economic injustice. Then, he turned to West. “Where am I going wrong?” he asked. West said that his “lens” was wrong, and that he was overlooking the widening economic inequality in America. “The oligarchs and plutocrats that you tend to want to promote rather intensely [are] not only doing well but been too greedy!” he said. “I don’t think I’m promoting anybody who’s doing untoward things,” O’Reilly said. “We’re talking about chronic excess!” West responded, causing O’Reilly to try to shut him up. “No filibustering here,” O’Reilly snapped. He said that what Smiley and West seemed to want was for the government to “forcibly seize” money from the rich and give it to the poor. “That’s socialism and that’s not going to work here,” he concluded. “It wasn’t socialism when we bailed out the banks in the first place?” Smiley said. He started to say that O’Reilly had been “right” in a recent attack on Stanley O’Neal, the former head of Merril Lynch. O’Reilly misheard him. “Lied about it?!” he thundered. “What do you mean i lied about it?!” “I said you were right!” Smiley said. “R-i-g-h-t!” O’Reilly apologized, and assured his guests he was “calm.” Things got a lot less calm right afterwards, though. Smiley asked why O’Reilly was focusing on O’Neal, one of the few black CEOs of a major firm, causing O’Reilly to shout, “we treat everybody the same here!” Smiley disagreed, and wondered why, when Occupy Wall Street protesters were being arrested, no “bankster” had gone to jail “to pay for his crimes.” “They didn’t violate any laws!” O’Reilly said, prompting Smiley and West to essentially lose it. “OOOOOHHHHHHHH!” they both said together. “How do you know?!” West yelled. “There’s been no investigations! Why would you say something like that?!” “All right, knock it off!” O’Reilly fired back. “…You don’t have any evidence!” West countered that, with no investigation, no criminality could be proven. “You take your law school at Princeton, you develop an illegality and I will put it on the air,” O’Reilly said. WATCH: Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
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If you don’t own a BlackBerry yourself, chances are you know somebody who does. And if that person lives in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America or South America, they’re probably quite unhappy with RIM at the moment. This week’s service outage began with a server failure in the UK , and spread like wildfire to Africa and the Middle East , before continuing on to parts of Asia, the US, Canada and a good portion of South America. This is only the latest BlackBerry service outage for RIM, bringing email, BBM and web browsing services to a halt. But with BlackBerry services playing a critical role in real-time business and government communications, any interruption is unacceptable, and costly for all. RIM CTO David Yach responded to questions during a press conference this afternoon, explaining the original cause of the outage (that UK server failure, along with a series of failed redundancies), and how that grew into the global outage we’re experiencing now: “It’s a backlog issue. Clearly we have a backlog in Europe, based on the initial outage and the time it’s taken to stabilize that. At this point, we have not throttled the other regions, but as you can imagine, with the global reach of BlackBerry, people using it to contact others around the world, there’s a lot of messages coming to Europe from Asia and the Americas, and those would be backed up on the other system. It’s looking like over time that backlog built, and started impacting those other systems.” The obvious solution would be to clear the backlog and restore service, but in doing so, RIM would purge any undelivered messages. Yach said that all emails will eventually be delivered, however, so you shouldn’t have anything to worry about there (there was no related comment regarding BBM messages). When asked what the company would be doing to “make right” by way of its customers, Yach emphasized that his focus was only on restoring service at this point, and made no promises of restitution. Is the BlackBerry outage affecting you? Let us know by voting in our poll , or leaving a comment after the break. Continue reading RIM clarifies global service outage, doesn’t provide ETA for restore RIM clarifies global service outage, doesn’t provide ETA for restore originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Since its introduction, Microsoft’s second generation Xbox 360 has had nary a stand-alone HDD option aside from the company’s proprietary 250GB drive , priced at a spendy $130 — this despite those occasional limited edition consoles packing a massive 320GBs of space. That’s soon to change, however, as Major Nelson’s announced a new 320GB HDD for the 360, set to be available this month. Possibly in an attempt to sweeten the deal, this platter maintains the 250GB’s $130 cost of adoption, and comes pre-loaded with Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars (sadly though, no Lego love for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Slovakia or Japan, where the game won’t be available). Notably, rather than dropping the 250GB drive’s price, it’s now curiously absent from the Xbox website (and we won’t hold our breath waiting for it to pop up again either). Nothing like a good ol’ fashioned pricing premium for official Xbox storage , right ? 320GB HDD available this month for Xbox 360, $130 ups your storage game originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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