None of the attacks caused significant damage, but they were part of a spike in hacking attacks on networks and computers of all kinds over the same period. The department recorded more than 50,000 incidents since October, about 10,000 more than in the same period a year earlier, with an incident defined as any intrusion or attempted intrusion on a computer network.
The increase has prompted a new interest in cybersecurity on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are being prodded by the Obama administration to advance legislation that could require new standards at facilities where a breach could cause significant casualties or economic damage.
It is not clear whether the higher numbers were due to increased reporting amid a wave of high-profile hacking, including the arrest last week of several members of the group Anonymous, or an actual increase in attacks.
James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and a specialist in computer security issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy group in Washington, said that as hacking awareness had increased, attacks had become more common. He said that the attacks on the nation’s infrastructure were particularly jarring.
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Lina Medina, a 5-year-old Peruvian girl, was the youngest person to ever give birth. She gave birth to a boy on May 14, 1939. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
7 Scientific Reasons You’ll Turn Out Just Like Your Parents.
Have Art Experts Discovered a Lost da Vinci Masterpiece?
Police, retailers dismiss claims of Tide theft epidemic.
JonBenet Ramsey’s Father calls Toddlers & Tiaras “bizarre,” says he regrets putting daughter in pageants.
RIP: Michael Hossack, Doobie Brothers drummer, dead at 65.
Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks arrested again along with husband, four others.
NASDAQ closes above 3,000 for the first time since December 2000.
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Astronauts at Risk of Eye and Brain Damage
Long periods of weightlessness could have detrimental effects on eyesight. Medical tests detected abnormalities in the brains and eyes of some astronauts who spent more than 30 days in space, including expansion of the cerebral spinal fluid space surrounding the optic nerve, flattening of the rear of the eyeball, bulging of the optic nerve, and changes in the pituitary gland and its connection to the brain. These types of abnormalities are typically seen in cases of intracranial hypertension, a condition in which there is a buildup of pressure within the skull that can eventually lead to vision loss. More …
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Since the financial crisis of 2008, everybody and their mother has been looking for some way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The responses so far have been woefully inadequate. No one thinks the reforms that have been enacted or are being considered would solve the problem.
The most “radical” reform anyone has proposed is a return of the separation between retail and investment banking, which in my view doesn’t solve anything: the two biggest busts in the financial crisis, Lehman Brothers in the US and Northern Rock in the UK, were full-investment banks and full-retail banks respectively. What’s more, the devil is in the details: when you get down to it, it’s very hard to draw the line between “retail” services and “investment” ones, or at least not in a way that would choke credit off the economy and take the financial system back to the 1990s. So a “New Glass-Steagall” would be at best an irrelevancy, and at worst a nightmare.
So, what do we do? I’ve been thinking about this on and off for about four years, and I finally have an answer that’s pretty close to satisfying me. I’d like to submit it to you in the hopes of refining it (or abandoning it).
My blueprint has two basic planks:
A return to the partnership model
Almost complete deregulation of the financial system
I know, I know, but hear me out.
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Barring the odd empress, China is historically not a very glorious place to be a woman. From foot-binding to female infanticides, Chinese women have suffered their share of gender-specific hardships. Today, these women are 650 million strong. They represent the world’s largest female population, the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires, and with 63 percent of GMAT takers in China being female, they’re attaining MBAs with a ferocity that’s making the boys blush. And yet, no matter how ambitious or accomplished, they remain bound. Not by their feet, but by something that can be just as inhibiting — marriage.
In China, there’s a deep-seated tradition of marriage hypergamy which mandates that a woman must marry up. This generally works out, as it allows the Chinese man to feel superior, and the woman to jump a social class or two, but it gets messy for highly accomplished females. Their educations and salaries make them hard to compete with, and so their Chinese male counterparts shy away in favor of younger, more “manageable” beauties.
As these women age, their marriageability plummets, and they acquire a snazzy new name: “shengnu.” Used to describe an unmarried woman ever so precariously teetering near the age of 30, this word literally means “leftover woman.” The prefix “sheng” is the same as in the word “shengcai” or “leftover food.” Loosely translated, it implies that single women of a certain age in China are the stuff of doggy bags, Tupperware and garbage disposals.
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6-year-old Lori Anne Madison is set to become the youngest person ever to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The home-schooled Woodbridge, Virginia girl took first place in the Prince William County spelling contest after correctly spelling the word “vaquero.”
“My parents quiz me,” she told WTTG-TV. “I read lists and I have a really good memory.”
Madison is two years younger than the previous youngest contestant.
The National Spelling Bee will take place between May 27th and June 1st at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
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The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council is battling back against what it calls an “outrageous, inflammatory” billboard that claims hot dogs “cause butt cancer.”
The sign, which recently went up in Chicago on the Eisenhower Expressway is part of a larger awareness campaign by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group composed of doctors, dietitians, and nutritionists, that opposes the “unethical” treatment of animals and promotes a diet free of meat.
“Colon cancer is a killer, and processed meats get much of the blame,” said PCRM nutrition education director Susan Levin. Not surprisingly, Hot Dog Council president Janet M. Riley disagrees.
“Hot dogs are a great Chicago tradition and part of a healthy, balanced diet,” she said, adding that asking doctors, dietitians, or consulting the U.S. Dietary Guidelines will confirm he position.
Unfortunately for Riley, the billboard’s timing could not be better, as far as the PCRM are concerned. A comprehensive study released this week by the Harvard School of Public Health found that consuming red meat on a daily basis increased risk of an untimely demise by as much as 13 percent.
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PACIFIC OCEAN (Feb. 20, 2012) SEALs and divers from SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team (SDVT) 1 swim back to the guided-missile submarine USS Michigan (SSGN 727) during an exercise for certification on SEAL delivery vehicle operations in the southern Pacific Ocean. The exercises educate operators and divers on the techniques and procedures related to the delivery vehicle and its operations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Kristopher Kirsop)
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25-year-old Dallas Seavey has become the youngest person ever to win the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, crossing the finish line in Nome, Alaska, a week and a half after leaving the starting point in Anchorage.
His win entitles him to $50,400 and a brand new Dodge truck.
Seavey, a USA Wrestling champ who comes from a proud line of Iditarod mushers — his father, Mitch Seavey won in 2004 — took control of the race midway through.
Ally Zirkle, 41, who had been leading until then, will finish second. Ramey Smyth is expected to finish third.
The so-called “Last Great Race on Earth” was started in 1973, and covers a stretch of about 1,000 miles which generally takes mushers and their team of dogs between 10 to 17 days to complete. Last year’s winner, John Baker, set a course record by completed the Iditarod in 8 days and 19 hours.
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Nascar is a multibillion-dollar business whose history and rich mythology are rooted in money; Southern liquor-runners and moonshiners gave the earliest, postwar version of the sport much of its tone. But long before the advent of stock-car racing, competitive drivers cared less about prize or profit than about simply completing the course. The men who lined up in the swirling snow of Times Square on the morning of February 12, 1908, were embarking on a nearly unimaginable feat: a race from New York to Paris, westward. The contest was sponsored not by Bank of America or Coors Light, but by the French newspaper Le Matin and the New York Times. The prize: a 1,400-pound trophy and proving it could be done.
The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage. The New York-to-Paris race was supposed to be (and is still largely considered) the greatest of them all, even surpassing the prior year’s Peking-to-Paris competition, in which the winner, Italian Prince Scipione Borghese, enlisted donkeys and mules to pull his car and sipped oily water from its radiator to relieve his thirst. His reward was a magnum of champagne.
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Red Bull South Africa earlier this week unveiled the latest addition to its ongoing “Red Bull gives you wings” campaign — a 30-spot featuring Jesus revealing the “secret” behind his miraculous water-walking feat.
Wouldn’t ya know it, the ad did not go over well with many viewers, who demanded it be pulled immediately.
Unfortunately for Red Bull, the energy drink doesn’t actually give you wings, so in lieu of saying “see you later, suckers” and flying away, the company relented and pulled the ad as requested.
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On Kony 2012: The Visible Victims Speak: Considering that Kony 2012 — the most viral video in Internet history — exploits the suffering of northern Ugandans to raise money, Victor Ochen, a victim of the Lord’s Resistance Army and a founder of the nonprofit African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET), thought it only right that they should get to see it too.
Ochen traveled to the city of Lira, where he and his NGO set up a makeshift outdoor theater so locals could watch Invisible Children’s much-discussed fundraising campaign, and decide for themselves if it helps or hurts.
According to a statement released by AYINET, over 35,000 people attended the screening, many of whom rode in on bikes from neighboring villages. Additionally, some two million northern Uganda residents tuned in to a live broadcast of the audio aired simultaneously on five FM radio stations.
Al Jazeera reporter Malcolm Webb, who was on hand to gauge people’s reactions, filed the following account:
People I spoke to anticipated seeing a video that showed the world the terrible atrocities that they had suffered during the conflict, and the ongoing struggles they still face trying to rebuild their lives after two lost decades.
The audience was at first puzzled to see the narrative lead by an American man – Jason Russell – and his young son.
Towards the end of the film, the mood turned more to anger at what many people saw as a foreign, inaccurate account that belittled and commercialised their suffering, as the film promotes Kony bracelets and other fundraising merchandise, with the aim of making Kony infamous.
A woman Webb spoke with afterwards compared IC’s approach of selling products with Kony’s image to “selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11,” which she felt would be offensive to many Americans, irrespective of how “well-intentioned” the fundraising campaign was.
Last night’s screening was AYINET’s first and last. It announced this morning that it had suspended further screenings of Kony 2012 in light of the outrage it caused.  Wrote Ochen: “It was very hurtful for victims and their families to see posters, bracelets and t-shirts, all looking like a slick marketing campaign, promoting the person most responsible for their shattered lives.”
“Why give such criminals celebrity status?” asked people in attendance, according to AYINET. “Why not make the plight of the victims and the war-ravaged communities, people whose sufferings are real and visible, the focus of a campaign to help?”
Originally posted 2012-03-14 13:57:06. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
