A new study found that mobile phones contain 18 times the amount of bacteria as a toilet handle, the Telegraph reports:

Swabs and analysis of 30 mobile handsets found that seven had high or warning levels of environmental bacteria. One contained such an intense concentration of bacteria, including faecal coliforms, that anyone using it could have faced a serious stomach upset.

According to hygiene expert Jim Francis “The levels of potentially harmful bacteria on one mobile were off the scale. That phone needs sterilizing.” The tests showed how easily bacteria could linger on the surface of a phone, which could be passed on to other people if they held the handset to look at photos or other applications.

You got an app for that?

The Afghan woman publicly executed by Taliban militants for alleged adultery was pregnant, it emerged today.

The victim, 48-year-old Bibi Sanubar, was flogged up to 200 times before being shot  on Sunday – in the head and chest – in the remote Qades district. Her alleged lover managed to escape.

Abdul Jabbar Khan, security chief in the Taliban-controlled area, said the killing was ordered after the woman allegedly killed her newborn child to conceal illicit sex.

via Daily Mail - Read more…

The trailer for AN OMAR BROADWAY FILM premiering on HBO July 14. Produced by 4th Row Films.

Scientists found this sperm whale 77 miles south from the Deepwater spill site off the Gulf Coast.

It began with a startling, inexplicable explosion of anger over a seat on a D train. And then the passenger who had resisted giving up his seat was bleeding from stab wounds, staggering through the car, collapsing, dying.

The other passengers on the train at 2 a.m. Saturday — among them four photography students on their way home from burgers and beer in a Midtown restaurant — had just become witnesses to a murder. One of the students, Paola Nuñez Solorio, 30, chronicled the aftermath of the stabbing, ending her day as she had begun it, watching the world through her camera.

In the morning she had zoomed in on apartment-building courtyards for a school project. Now she was photographing frightened passengers, a wounded man tottering through the train, a killer standing at the end of the car.

She took 120 photographs in the mayhem that followed the stabbing, some out of focus, some a blur of passengers scrambling to get out of harm’s way, some showing the victim’s blood on the floor, some showing the victim’s body sprawled across the two seats he collapsed on.

New York City and its subways are far safer than they once were, but violence can still erupt, seemingly out of nowhere, and Ms. Nuñez’s photographs captured the harrowing moments in all their unfiltered, unvarnished reality.

Ms. Nuñez and her friends had been standing in the first car of the uptown D train after they boarded at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas. There were scattered empty seats, not enough for them to sit together, so they stood, talking about nothing in particular.

The train stopped at Rockefeller Center, and moments after it pulled out of the station, they realized something was wrong at the other end of their car.

“Everyone started running toward us,” Ms. Nuñez said. “We thought there was a fight. Then we saw this guy with blood coming out of his mouth, and the killer right behind him, putting this thing away. I didn’t know what it was.”

It was a knife, other passengers said.

Instinctively, Ms. Nuñez reached for her camera, a digital single-lens reflex model that did not need a flash to function in the fluorescent light of the car.

She and her friends had not noticed the suspect, identified by the police as Geraldo Sanchez, 37, an exterminator from the Bronx, when he boarded at Rockefeller Center. Nor had they realized that he had gone on a rampage at the other end of the car, spilling food and demanding that a passenger, Dwight Johnson, 36, vacate a seat beside one of the doors.

Mr. Johnson said there were other seats.

Mr. Sanchez said he wanted that seat. Soon he pulled out a knife and slashed Mr. Johnson’s hands and neck, witnesses said. Ms. Nuñez said Mr. Johnson staggered through the car, bleeding, with Mr. Sanchez right behind him.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said, and she and her friends realized they might be in danger: “We were stuck with the killer.”

The fear behind that thought deepened when someone pulled the emergency brake cord, freezing the train between Rockefeller Center and the Seventh Avenue station. The passengers were trapped in the car with the suspect and the dying victim longer than if the train had gone on to the station and had been met by the police.

As the train sat in the tunnel, the terrified passengers huddled together. Mr. Sanchez walked by and began trying to open the locked door leading to the next car. “We didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Nuñez said. “A guy standing with us said, ‘Don’t move.’ ”

Another passenger, a woman, fainted. The man with her tried to revive her, Ms. Nuñez said.

After several long minutes, the train started moving again. It pulled into the next station, at Seventh Avenue, but the doors remained closed.

One of Ms. Nuñez’s friends said it appeared that the two officers on the platform were waiting for backups to arrive. That left the passengers in the car feeling vulnerable anew. “People were looking at us like we were in the zoo,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified because she had not told her father that she had been at the scene.

Once the doors opened and the police stepped in, “We told them, ‘That’s the guy who killed him,’ ” the woman recalled. “They said, ‘Step aside.’ ”

She said Mr. Sanchez tried to blend in with the other passengers as police officers swarmed into the car. “The killer tried to be a part of us,” she said. She remembered hearing him say, “I didn’t do anything.”

Mr. Johnson was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said. Mr. Sanchez was charged with second-degree murder and weapons possession.

Apparently, there’s a global oil scam making Bernie Madoff look like a petty thief.

If serial entrepreneur and Seeking Alpha columnist Philip Davis is to be believed, the world is being scammed out of $2.5 trillion, 50 times greater than the sum Madoff took from the duped investors.

According to Davis, the scam starts in 2000 with the formation of the ICE – the Intercontinental Exchange. The ICE – founded by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, Total, Shell, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale – is an online commodities and futures marketplace that exists outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.

After a Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003, the ICE was found to be facilitating “round-trip” trades. This is where one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm sells the same amount of energy back to the first company, at the same time and at the exact same price, as told by Davis.

No commodity ever changes hands

Quite shockingly no commodity ever changes hands, but the transactions still send a signal to the market, artificially boosting company revenue. Angry yet? There’s more.

Because the trading is unregulated by Washington, its difficult to gauge the scale on which “round-trip” trading takes place.

But when DMS Energy were investigated by Congress, the company admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were round-trip trades. This means 80 percent of all trades in that year were false trades. Not a drop of oil changed hands, but the balance sheets showed increased revenue.

The idea is to hike up commodity prices. For example, according to Davis, after the ICE turned commodity trading into a “speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced”, Goldman Sachs were able to triple the price of commodities in just five years.

ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand

The beauty (or rather the horror) of the scam outlined by Davis is that because they control the oil markets, the ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge consumers an extra dollar per gallon of gas. And whereas this may not seem like much, this $1 soon becomes $50 billion A MONTH as global drivers consume 1.7 billion gallons of gas every single day.

Whereas, at this stage, it would not be accurate or indeed wise to suggest what Philip Davis claims is either true or false, one cannot ignore the issue. There have been concerns for may years that global markets are controlled by a monopoly of mega-organizations, but there could be a strong case for suggesting the ICE is close to becoming just that – a super-organization with the power to push oil prices up or down.

Good luck Washington, you might just be getting a deluge of mail demanding answers.

The slide show below comes from SlideShare.net and gives a breakdown of the global oil scam.

Comparison of both economic and financial indicators between the two countries.

Recent news articles have brought to light the fact that almost 47% of households in the US currently have zero or negative federal tax liability. We take a closer look at this lack of liability across each income level, highlighting the percentage in each range that will not pay any taxes. Also shown is a full breakdown of who is paying the bulk of all taxes collected by the Federal Government each year.

Personal Finance
Software – Mint.com

With congress set to raise the limit on the national debt, let’s take a look at just how much money that is.
With a total statutory debt limit of $12.1 trillion ($12,100,000,000,000) and the U.S. population at 304 million (304,000,000), the debt per American is $39,800.

The U.S. debt is the total amount of money the government has borrowed (from its people and foreigners) in order to pay for past government spending. Some of the money has been invested in infrastructure like roads and education, while the rest has gone into political pork barrel projects, subsidies or social causes.

One way to think about the $39,000 is that it is the amount that the U.S. government has been charged on its credit card. If it is able to make more than the minimum payments with increased tax revenue and thus reduce its overall debt, then borrowing can be a good thing. But if it is unable, then the payments become a heavy burden on the government and the next generation.

Are you ready to pay your portion off?