A couple of New Jersey parents may have slapped their daughter and taken money from her paycheck to pay the cable bill, but that’s hardly child abuse or neglect, the state Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The child in question, now an adult, was removed from her home in 2008 after…
Continue reading …Are you ready to become an unpaid spokesman for all your favorite things? Facebook sure hopes so. The company has just rolled out a new advertising product called “sponsored stories” that will turn your posts into ads for companies you post about. In the example video, a user “checking in”…
Continue reading …New York Times editor Bill Keller’s lengthy essay on dealing with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange continues to ricochet around the blogosphere, with most of the attention focused on his not-so-flattering assessment of Assange as a person. He describes the WikiLeaker as “arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial, and oddly credulous” and says Assange…
Continue reading …Just when you finally stopped feeling insecure about your not-as-sexy-as-Michelle-Obama arms, along comes Kate Middleton to make you feel bad about your … knees?! Yep, at least according to a Telegraph piece from last week, the Boston Globe reports. Middleton is constantly flaunting her excellent knees, and at least one…
Continue reading …Good grades just aren’t enough to get you into a top-notch college these days. So Nicholas Harrington took a different route. The 16-year-old has stepped forward as the brains and (part of the) brawn behind the baby grand piano that mysteriously appeared on a sandbar off the coast of Miami—…
Continue reading …Afghanistan’s new parliament was finally sworn in yesterday, much to Hamid Karzai’s chagrin. The Afghan president’s failed bid to delay the new parliament’s arrival is the latest in a string of political miscues that have left Karzai in a precarious position, diplomats, analysts, and Afghan lawmakers tell the New York…
Continue reading …In 2005, a professor found a reference to “Long Wall of Quang Ngai” in a 19th-century Vietnamese document. Five years later, Dr Andrew Hardy and his team have uncovered that nearly 200-year-old—and 79-mile long—wall, reports CNN . Up to 13 feet high in places, the scale is much smaller…
Continue reading …An American consular employee shot and killed two armed men who approached his car on a busy street in Lahore, Pakistan yesterday, police said today. The gunmen drove at him on motorbikes, brandishing guns, in what police suspect was a robbery attempt, one officer told the AP . The unidentified American…
Continue reading …The drama over Taco Bell’s meat-or-not just keeps getting better and better. After issuing a statement arguing that its meat was, in fact, meat, it has released another statement that attaches a number to that proclamation: “Our seasoned beef recipe contains 88% quality USDA-inspected beef.” And that approach is just…
Continue reading …Mark Sanford “hiked the Appalachian Trail” again last week, but this time he did so a bit more publicly: An Argentine celebrity magazine has published an eight-page spread on the former South Carolina governor that catches him frolicking with “soul mate” Maria Belen Chapur at a Uruguay resort just one…
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