TV Presenter Accused of Sorcery, Sentenced to Death in Saudi Arabia

In a story to make your blood boil, a Lebanese man named Ali Hussain Sibat is being sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia.
His crime?
Sorcery.
The father of five is a television personalty who is accused of performing black magic on his show.
He was in Saudi Arabia to make Umra, a traditional muslim pilgrimage, when he was arrested by the countries religious police, the Mutawa'een.
His trail has been dragging on for some time, but now that a verdict has been reached it's receiving global attention.
Here's to hoping he gets set free, or at the very least, they stay his execution until someone can talk so sense into their legal system.

Thailand's Bloody Protest

Tensions have been growing in Thailand lately, after a week-long slew of marches and demonstrations to call for new elections as people grow increasingly fed up with Prime Minister Abhisit Vejajjiva's corrupt and dirty rule.

Today those tensions came to a head, as protesters collected what they claim as nearly 80 gallons of blood from activists, and hurled them at Abhisit's house and other governmental offices.

There is very little talk of any of the protests being met with violence yet, though with the amount of publicity and global coverage that has been following this event since protesters first announced the desire to throw blood everywhere, that is to be expected. 

Crackdowns will probably come later.

I have to say, this sends a pretty intense message, even if the government was prepared and cleaned the blood up within minutes. Certainly nobody can doubt the resolve of Thailand's popular opposition now.

The BBC has pics up on its website.

The Stranger's Sexy Survey

The Stranger's 2009 sex survey was put up a few days ago. It can be read in full here.
According to them:

The Stranger received 6,942 completed sex surveys—more than five times the sample size of the presidential polls in the New York Times. Which means our poll is more than five times more accurate than theirs. (Eat it, New York Times!)

It's a bit less interesting then last years was, but still contains some interesting information, such as...

• More people from Belltown have had sex with a homeless person then from have people from other neighborhoods.
• 4 times more people have been peed on then have had sex to Andersoon Cooper on CNN.
• Most people agree that sexted is a completely retarded term.
• More people'd invite Michella Obama then Barack Obama to an orgy barely.
  
• 10% of people would invite Hilary Clinton. Uck.
  

The Man Whose Arm's Exploded

"After spending twenty minutes stabbing himself with the syringe, and ozzing out buckets of blood and pus..."

This could be one of the grosser things I've seen on the net that doesn't involve Russian prostitutes in a bath tub.
TLC did this report on Gregg Valentino, the man who decided normal steroids weren't enough and decided to inject himself with enough nasty shit to make his arms grow all elephant man and then explode.
Just the thought is enough to make me shudder.
Heres the vid from Youtube, kudos to the poster, andrefgb.

First Human Leaves Solar System

The gods of the internet led me to stumble upon this interesting article by the "Fortean Times : The World of Strange Paranoma," which claims that as you sit here and read this, the perfectly preserved body of a lost Russian cosmonaut is currently drifting outside our solar system.
According to the article, his name and story were all but hidden from the world by Russia, and if not for the diligence and obsession of two Italian brothers who were secretly spying on NASA and the Russia Space Program, would never have seen the light of day.
Suck on that, Yuri Gagarin.

Cop to Twitter "Lets bash some hippys"

The English Police force is just getting more and more fucking corrupt.
Apparently some idiot cop thought that posting "Can't wait to bash some long haired hippys (sic) up @ the G20" to his twitter was a good idea.
Coming days after the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of bobbies, this officer has now been warned.
The Police are supposed to be public defenders.
Read the article, get outraged.

Swine Flu : Epidemic of the Week

Condolences to anyone who gets killed, sick, or loses a loved one to Swine Flu, but has anybody else had enough of ratings-hungry media organizations coming out every few months with a new epidemic set to kill us all?
When I was in grade school, Killer Bee's were going to invade from South America or Africa and take over, trapping us in our homes and stinging us to death.
Then there was SAR's, which was far scarier for the way governments around the world reacted to it then it actually ended up being itself.
There are, of course, very real dangers of a disease outbreak, even in our own 'modern times's...though most people bizazzarely have never heard of the post WWI Inlfuenza pandemic.
But there is a fine line between actual danger and appropriate response, sensationalism and actual truth. I don't doubt someday we will face a real epidemic, but panic and fear sells newsprint, and judging by the fact that 'Swine Flu' has been googgled an ungodly amount of times today, I think we're in for a year or so of disease based terror.

Beware the Wrath of a Chinless Penguin!

I'm all for global warming (fighting it, not it happening) but I'm starting to despair a little because our cause seems to be again under attack by the sinister Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley!
RUN IN FEAR!
Perhaps somebody should tell him being royalty hasn't been fashionable in the west since most of our kings and barons heads ended up on the pikes they used to beat our ancestors into submission for centuries.
What does he look like to you? A penguin? A chinless Robert Mitchum? Somebody who fiddles children on a carousel?

Porno Pirates

Somalian pirates are not the only pirates making a big controversy this year.
A so-called hardcore porn by the name of "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge" has become a catalyst for heated debate, from the storied halls of government to the dirty, sticky floors of a college theater.
The film, a multiple award winning triple-X porn that owes more then a passing resemblance to "Pirates of the Caribbean," has been shown at schools around the country and was to be played at the University of Maryland's Student Union Theatre before the Maryland Legislature got wind of the idea and promptly shot it down.
The student union was planning to show the film in the same theater that, just years before, they'd screened the legendary “Deep Throat.” Planned Parenthood members were set to talk before the screening to educate the audience on safe-sex practices, as the actors in the film tend to do their swash buckling sans buckle.
When the Maryland General Assembly heard of what was going down, they came out swinging.
"Pornography is not fun. It's poison," said Sen. Andrew Harris, a republican who led the attack, in an article from the Washington Post.
“If guys want to view triple-X movies with their buddies, that’s fine, but it doesn’t belong on a college campus in a state-funded building,” Sen. Nancy Jacobs. a fellow republican senator, said later in the same Washington Post article.

Harris and company pushed an amendment that would cut off state funding for any university screening porn, in the University of Maryland’s case, upwards of $400 million dollars.

Unsurprisingly, the school buckled, but the real issue is only now coming to a head.
Everywhere bloggers, activists and news reporters from all walks of life are weighing in on whether the government should ever have a say in what goes on in college campuses, whether the first amendment protects porn, whether the film is obscenity and just who gets to define what obscenity is.
According to Adam Kissel, a director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education who was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun,“[the legislature was] far out of line...I think because of the autonomy that a public university ought to have versus the legislature, the president should not have canceled the film.”
Students at UMD have been staging token protests, showing clips from the film in an ‘education’ seminar on free speech and slamming their administrations urge to bend over backward before the legislature at the slightest show of dominance.
It’s still unclear exactly what the fallout of all this will be, with nothing except gallons of free publicity for the porn flick in question being the likely answer.