- No one ever said blood diamonds weren’t valuable. In fact, they’re so valuable that Zimbabwe's mining minister proclaimed Wednesday that the country "will no longer be begging for anything from anybody" after international diamond regulators agreed to let it trade some $2 billion in diamonds from a field human rights groups believe miners have been brutally tortured. Mining Minister Obert Mpofu made his bold proclamation after Kimberley Process experts meeting in Congo agreed to allow Zimbabwe to sell diamonds from the Marange fields. The Kimberley Process was set up in 2002 after bloody wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia fueled by the struggle over so-called "blood diamonds" led to international outcry. Zimbabwe had steadfastly denied allegations of human rights abuses in the area where the diamonds were mined but has had been under sanctions since 2009 because of "significant noncompliance" with the Kimberly Process. All participant nations are forced to certify the origins of the diamonds being traded, assuring consumers that they are not financing war or human rights abuses. The 140,000-acre Marange field in eastern Zimbabwe was discovered in 2006 at a time when the country was mired in a massive political, economic and humanitarian crisis. It is the biggest diamond find in the world since the 19th century and triggered a predictable and violent diamond rush. Zimbabwe’s diamond fate began to shift last year when the Kimberley Process declared two shipments of stones from the Zimbabwe mines conflict-free. The decision lifted a ban on the stones and allowed 900,000 carats of diamonds to be auctioned. On the heels of that partial lifting of the ban, the latest decision allows all diamonds from the area to be sold. With a collective value of around $2 billion, the stockpile of 4.5 million Marange diamonds has Zimbabwean officials crowing about their bright financial future and talking like Joe Namath or Muhammad Ali in their primes. "We are going to shock the world. We are going to unleash our worthiness," Mpofu proclaimed Wednesday. "Zimbabwe will no longer be begging for anything from anybody." Maybe not, but there will probably still be begging involved as in the hundreds of people abused, killed and forced into slave labor searching for the Marange diamonds begging for mercy from Zimbabwean troops accused of oppressing them. Human rights groups blasted the decision to allow the sale of the diamonds, saying Zimbabwe also had not met some conditions of the Kimberly Process. In the end, it’s a question of which is more important: human rights or financial well-being? As usual, the cash wins out……………
- Could there be a more bogus rumor than the one about 8-year-old Canadian pop-singing chick Justin Bieber allegedly fathering a child with a female fan after hooking up backstage at a concert? Last time I checked, 8-year-old chicks can’t have kids after close encounters with 20-year-old female fans. But that is the claim being put forth by Mariah Yeater, who alleges that before Bieber started dating girlfriend Selena Gomez, the two of them got it on backstage at a Bieber show. What’s bizarre about the story is that the alleged baby mama says the sexual encounter occurred at a show in California, where the age of consent is 18, and the teeny bopper pop hack would have been 16 when the alleged sexual encounter occurred. In other words, this woman would be guilty of statutory rape. But she’s not allowing that to stand in the way of her extortion attempt and is seeking - shocker - financial compensation. In her paternity suit, Yeater says she was whisked away by a security guard to meet Bieber following an L.A. tour stop. "Immediately, it was obvious that we were mutually attracted to one another, and we began to kiss," the paternity suit alleges. Okay, so there was so much chemistry there you just got after it from the first time you laid eyes on each other? Sounds totally believable. "Shortly thereafter, Justin Bieber suggested that I go with him to a private place where we could be alone," the court documents go on to state. Yeater then alleges that Bieber told her he didn't want to use protection because it was his first time having sex. Regardless of how baseless the allegations may be, the smart thing for Bieber to do would be allow her attorney to handle the matter and stay quiet, right? Either that or denounce the rumors on Twitter. "I'm gonna focus on the positives ... the music," Bieber tweeted shortly after the story broke. Great, now Bieber is lying too? There is, after all, nothing positive about his music - it’s gawd awful to the core. But making bad music does not mean Bieber is the father of Yeater’s 3-month-old child or that he owes her money for her delusions and desperation. Instead, he can focus on promoting his crap-tacular new Christmas album and stick to his claim that he’s never met Yeater. He just needs to be sure that there are no photos of the two of them floating around anywhere………….
- Idaho is exactly the sort of place to attract kooks who love guns and hate the government. Sorry Idaho (and Montana, North Dakota and all other states with higher populations of livestock than human beings and hundreds of times more open land than land covered by towns and cities), but you know it’s true. There’s a reason militia groups and other paramilitary kooks flock to these areas. They can be free, unfettered and largely unaccosted by the government. As such, it should have shocked no one when reports surfaced last week about a sniper school in Idaho's Skull Canyon. The story quickly came to the attention of the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service and both departments sent officials out to asses something called the Advanced Mountain Sniper Course. Specifically, they wanted to know if these gun-toting whack jobs were operating on public ground without authorization. The debate over the sniper school has not been resolved yet and the debate between BLM and USFS officials and leaders of the program continues, including whether or not those program leaders knew they were in the wrong. BLM officials showed them the boundary lines on a map and public affairs officer Lynn Ballard said it appeared the activity was also happening in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. "If they were using a typical forest service or BLM map, I think the boundary lines are pretty specific," said Ballard. "They knew they were traveling within the national forest." Advanced Mountain Sniper Course founder Buck Holly told reporters last week he was using private land to simulate Afghanistan terrain for sniper platoons getting ready to deploy. First off, Buck Holly sounds like a made-up name given this guy’s profession. Secondly, what are the odds that military snipers are going to Buck Holly’s sniper school to get ready for their missions? Nice try, Buck. Even if Holly is lying (and he probably is), both the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service say a permit is needed to carry out a program like the sniper course. Bureau officials said Holly requested a permit on Tuesday and issued a written statement to the media via email: "At the end of the day, we are going through all the proper channels to ensure all the proper permits and approvals are in place." However, he and his crew left the grounds on Saturday and have not decided when or even if they will return…………
- Are college students really getting as FAT when they first step on campus as commonly held wisdom would suggest? The research may not come from some wicked smart Ivy Leaguers, but the hearty Midwestern minds at Ohio State University's Center for Human Resource Research have done their due diligence on the popular myth of the “freshman 15” and found the idea to be a fallacy. As its name would suggest, the idea is that freshman away from home for the first time, living independently for the first time and with no dietary guidance (along with an abundance of free or cheap beer) and poor sleeping habits pack on the pounds. That 15-pound mark did not hold up under the microscope of science, as Jay Zagorsky, research scientist at OSU, and his team found that the average weight gain for freshmen is 2.4 pounds for women and 3.4 pounds for men. "Not only is there not a 'freshman 15,' there doesn't appear to be even a 'college 15' for most students," Zagorsky, one of the study’s co-authors, said. Furthermore, of all college freshmen, not more than 10 percent packed on 15 pounds or more, the study showed. In fact, one-fourth of freshmen reported that they lost weight during their first year. Results did show that students steadily gain weight during college, but even their weight gain for the four (or five, or six) years they spend on campus still doesn’t add up to 15. The study found that women gained seven to nine pounds, on average, and men 12 to 13 pounds. Those numbers fit in well with the basic reality that most people gain weight as they age and led Zagorsky to sat that "it is not college that leads to weight gain — it is becoming a young adult." In other words, Americans are lazy and exercise-averse and their metabolism begins slowing down at some point. To back this up, researchers studied IQ-deprived losers, er, individuals who decided not to attend college and found that women who do not attend college gained about two pounds and noncollege men gained about three pounds during the year they could have been freshmen. One amazing side note about the study is that Zagorsky co-authored it with a researcher from the University of Michigan (at Dearborn), Patricia Smith. The two of them used information from a study of more than 7,000 people nationwide for their not-surprising conclusions……….
- What has been missing from your Black Friday experience? Brawling with fellow shoppers for a spot in line at 4 a.m. so you can get the best deal on an Xbox at Target or the year’s hot toy at Wal-Mart is a given, as are sleep deprivation when you and the other loser shopping degenerates in your family or circle or friends drag yourselves out of bed before the sun rises to wait a cold, hard parking lot with hundreds of other idiots. But if you could pinpoint one missing element from the day after Thanksgiving, it would have to be NHL hockey, right? Don’t even bother to answer that one because the NHL has seen your need and they are springing into action. Seeking to mirror the relative success of the Winter Classic, which has quickly become a New Year's staple, the league is looking to turn Thanksgiving weekend into a hockey holiday. With the NBA still mired in a four-month (and counting) lockout and showing no signs of returning any time soon, the NHL is pairing with credit card company Discover for the "Discover NHL Thanksgiving Showdown," which takes place on the traditional shopping Friday after the holiday. The inaugural “Thanksgiving Showdown” will feature the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins and the Detroit Red Wings in an Original Six matchup on NBC. To further promote the event, Discover and the NHL also will debut a co-sponsored float during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. "We are looking to build an entirely new platform around Thanksgiving and have it include not only a game broadcast but something more," said David Lehanski, the NHL's group vice president of integrated sales. "That (parade) is chock full of the most iconic brands. To be a part of that for hockey is great." Doing battle with the NFL and its three-game Thanksgiving schedule would have been disaster for the NHL, so commissioner Gary Bettman and his staff chose the easier route. The league also had to shift the date of the 2012 Winter Classic, featuring the New York Rangers and the Philadelphia Flyers, to Jan. 2 along with the bowl games because the NFL is playing a regular schedule on New Year’s Day. The “Black Friday” game will commence NBC's coverage of the NHL for this season, marking the league's earliest start date on network TV since NBC acquired hockey broadcast rights in 2005. Fans typically ignore the entire NHL regular season and focus on the NFL, college football, college basketball and the NBA, but the NBA is AWOL for now. That could give the NHL a slight opening and if the league can convince just a small portion of the estimated 50 million viewers expected to watch the parade on television to stick around for the game, then the idea will be a success. The NHL-Discover float will be 36 feet long, 20 feet wide and called "Frozen Fall Fun," with past NHL stars, a synthetic ice rink and a 12-foot tall turkey that serves as a hockey goal. Pop music singer and reality karaoke show judge Cee-Lo Green will perform live on the float. Is any of this enough to make hockey more than an also-ran on the sports landscape? Probably not………….
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