- Look at South Sudan. Not even one year as a country under its belt and already, this new nation is acting like a true bully on the global scene and throwing its (limited) military might around like it’s the United States of America. To verify its status as a burgeoning bully, South Sudan even has a rebuke from the African Union, which said Thursday that South Sudan acted illegally when it sent troops across the border into Sudan to capture a strategic oil field. The AU Peace and Security Council demanded the force's immediate withdrawal while condemning both Sudan and South Sudan for hostile actions that appear to be pushing the two sides closer to resumption of the war that ended seven years ago. The council also pleaded with the presidents of both countries to show leadership as war seems imminent, with Peace and Security Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra warning that the south's military incursion into the northern oil field at Heglig and the north's aerial bombing campaign have pushed the region right back to the brink of war. "It cannot be reduced to yet just another incident like the ones we have seen before. Therefore, it is the feeling in the Peace and Security Council that it is the time now for the two leaders -- Presidents Omar al-Bashir and Salva Kiir -- to display the required leadership, so that the two countries would avoid a disastrous war which the two people do not need to fall in again," Lamamra said. Unfortunately for the council, the south's capture of Heglig appears to have destroyed any hoped for a peace summit. The plan had been in the works for a summit in Ethiopia on Saturday and Sunday, but Bashir said Thursday he would not attend. Meanhile, AU diplomats say South Sudan's move to capture and close the Heglig oil fields has cut Sudan's oil production in half. Mix in border clashes and calls for Sudan to reclaim the oil fields at any cost, sprinkle in a dose of South Sudan President Kiir telling his parliament he would not order a withdrawal from Heglig and the recipe for disaster is complete. Conflicts abound, too many parties are involved and a peaceful resolution is the last thing on nearly everyone’s mind………..
- Is there a way Justin Bieber’s music could be worse? Of course there is. Anyone who is not a) female and b) under the age of 17 may disagree, but the 8-year-old Canadian chick who has taken the pop world by storm the past couple of years can definitely step her game down a notch and the Biebs seems to have found the formula to do just that. As he works on his new album, cheesily and lamely titled “Believe,” the Biebs isn't even pretending that he has enough talent to carry the album on her own and has instead put together a collection of collaborators to help carry the load. Speaking about the album, Bieber name-dropped a few hip-hop heavyweights like Kanye West and Drake before revealing that he found a way to work the country-pop genre into the equation by collaborting with new BFF and country-pop darling Taylor Swift. "You know, the whole album is just so different, there's so many different people collaborating," Bieber said. Swift, one of Bieber’s victims on the revived “Punk’D” reality series, also penned a tune with the Biebs, who admits the track t will have a country vibe. "It's crazy," Bieber explained. "I mean I even wrote a song with Taylor Swift, so the whole album ranges differently." Ranges differently is another way of saying he’s all over the map because he doesn’t have the game or originality to find his own style and ride it for an entire album. "With my music, it doesn't only stay in a box. It's so out there. Everything is so different and that's why I'm so happy with this album," Biebs declared. Of course, teaming up with Swift was inevitable after the “Punk’D” encounter, the duo hitting the stage together for Swift's L.A. concert on her tour last year and them hanging out at other events as well. Congrats to Biebs for finding a way to take his music down another notch………..
- KILLER BACTERIA! FOUND IN A CAVE IN NEW MEXICO! THE END OF MANKIND! Okay, so technically none of that is true, but microbiologists have discovered nearly a hundred types of bacteria that can fight off modern antibiotic drugs and these bacteria were lurking in the bowels of a pristine New Mexico cave. Led by researcher Gerry Wright, a chemical biologist at McMaster University in Ontario, a team of microbiologists discovered the bacteria coating the walls of the Lechuguilla cave system on rock faces some 1,600 feet below Earth's surface. Before this discovery, these bacteria had never before encountered either humans or antibiotics. With a thick dome of rock concealing the cave, it’s no wonder the bacteria stayed hidden for so long. Water takes thousands of years to trickle through the surrounding rock and reach the cave, showing just how remote it is. The good news is that the bacteria are not infectious to humans. Still, they can resist multiple classes of antibiotics, including new synthetic drugs and their discovery could aid scientists in better understanding how drug-resistant diseases emerge. "Clinical microbiologists have been perplexed for the longest time. When you bring a new antibiotic into the hospital, resistance inevitably appears shortly thereafter, within months to years," Wright said. He and his colleagues discovered the bacteria in Lechuguilla, one of the deepest and most extensive cave systems in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Cavers discovered an entrance to the cave in 1984, but 28 years later the U.S. National Park Service strictly limits entry to the cave. The park service granted geomicrobiologist Hazel Barton of Northern Kentucky University and her team access into the cavern. "Hazel sampled sites clearly not touched by humans before. Because it's so pristine, you can see where people—all of the people—have walked," Wright said. "It's a serious stretch of the imagination to think any of the sites sampled have seen significant impact by anything from the surface." Barton and her colleagues have scraped off and bagged samples of biofilms—thick mats of bacteria—growing on the cave walls and delivered them to Wright’s laboratory for analysis. In the lab, researchers discovered signs of antibiotic resistance characteristic of strains often called superbugs, which can immobilize, chew up, or block natural and synthetic antibiotic compounds. Superbugs are common on farms, where antibiotic use is common. While scientists do not yet understand how such bacteria become resistant to all known antibiotics, Wright suspects the answer may lie in the fact that bacteria regularly exchange, receive, or steal genes from other bacteria in their environments. "It's kind of a thesis at this point: These benign environmental organisms are the root of resistance," Wright said. So far his team has grown 500 different kinds of bacteria from the Lechuguilla caves. Nearly 70 of those types resisted three to four classes of antibiotics, while three of these strains are distant relatives of the bacterium that creates anthrax spore and fought off 14 of the 26 antibiotics. Could the plot of a bad horror movie centered on all of this learning be far away…………
- Yard sales are a joke. They are a magnet for old people and losers with no friends and hobbies who want to spend their weekend scanning the classified ads for yard sale listings and them bum rush suburban neighborhoods where people looking to get rid of their crap by convincing others to pay for it put their junk out in their garage and driveway with a price tag on it. Said losers roll up on those driveways and garages and haggle over whether the chipped Betty Boop lamp is worth $2.25 or $1.75 and if that missing G.I. Joe figurine in the set makes the entire collection worth $5 instead of $7.50. As the weather warms up across the United States, the yard sale menace becomes an issue at the forefront in many communities and the good folks of South Greensburg, Pa. are thinking ahead this time. Knowing that many among them will look to unload their dusty, long-forgotten attic junk in yard sales in the coming months, the borough council in South Greensburg is laying down the law on garage sales. Banning them would be ideal, but that might also be illegal. Instead, the council has established what a yard sale is and what is permitted when holding a yard sale. “We decided, with the warmer weather coming up, we would sort of define what a garage sale was,” council president Clentin Martin said. Martin has proposed an ordinance to prevent “people going to flea markets, buying junk that they collect in these flea markets bringing it home, then putting it into their garage, and then calling it a ‘garage sale.’” The ordinance, which would limit each South Greensburg family to two yard sales per year, will be voted on next month. Additionally, the law would place a time limit on each yard sale. “That would be two consecutive days,” Martin says, “and they couldn’t run it all week. And they can’t run it weekly. They can’t run it monthly. Just two separate permits that would limit that. And it’s relatively inexpensive. It’s $5 a permit.” Bam. That’s right, forcing people to apply for a permit to hold a yard sale. Brilliant idea, Clentin. This man needs to be running something much more important than the borough council in some small Pennsylvania town…………
- Some athletes adjust to life after sports better than others. They have a plan for what they want to do once their career is over and they work that plan perfectly. Los Angeles Lakers legend and Basketball Hall of Famer Magic Johnson, also one of the new owners of the L.A. Dodgers, is a prime example. Johnson has been a huge success in business since retiring from basketball. Former Montreal Expos/Baltimore Orioles/Los Angeles Angles slugger Vladimir Guerrero doesn’t appear to be following in Johnson’s footsteps. Yes, Guerrero is early in his post-baseball life, but he’s not off to a good start, not if he’s involved in altercations with fellow patrons and police officers outside a discothèque in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. First, is anyone else amazed that discothèques still exist in the first place? This isn't 1975, after all. Beyond that, attacking a police officer (allegedly) doesn’t reflect well on a person’s judgment or attitude. Guerrero had been under investigation after authorities alleged that attacked a police officer after fighting broke out at the discothèque. Guerrero, once one of the most-feared hitters in baseball, has apparently resorted to hitting other clubbers and cops. Fortunately for the man once dubbed “Vlad the Impaler” for his Herculean cuts at the plate, no charges will be filed after he turned himself in early Tuesday and the prosecutor in Bani announced Wednesday that he would not press charges. Still, the image of a former MLB superstar in a leisure suit at a discothèque, throwing down with cops, doesn’t bode well for said former superstar’s life sans baseball……….
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