The plan: a California ballot initiative that would end public benefits for illegal immigrants, cut off welfare payments for their children and impose new rules for birth certificates.

"We will be out in full force to qualify this initiative," said Barbara Coe, who helped develop Proposition 187, the 1994 measure that would have ended benefits to illegal immigrants but was ruled unconstitutional. "Illegals and their children are costing the state billions of dollars. It's invasion by birth canal."

Supporters of the initiative, recently unveiled by San Diego political activist Ted Hilton, hope to challenge the citizenship of children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally.

The 14th Amendment states that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside." Backers of the initiative argue that illegal residents are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States and that, as a result, their U.S.-born children should not be citizens.

@mc_frontalot Watching Al Franken portray senator Simon in '91 SNL Supreme Court Justice Confirmation Hearing skit. http://bit.ly/o3EGk

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WJBK) - An extremely dangerous scene in Hazel Park where a tanker truck, possibly two, have exploded into flames on I-75. The overpass at Nine Mile Road has collapsed. Fire crews from several nearby cities are on the scene, but the flames continue to re-ignite.

It is believed the truck or trucks hit a bridge at Nine Mile Road, flipped over, burst into flames and causing a chain reaction.

The smoke and flames are massive and can be seen for miles around metro Detroit.

We do not know how many vehicles have been involved, but we know there are some other cars and a Meijer semi truck burst into flames on the highway.

A man found naked at a casino claimed he was a Terminator sent from the future.

19-year-old Sean Stanley Smith was arrested on the Nevada border after he was spotted by a motorist wandering around the highway nude. He was ordered by police to stop but proceeded into a nearby casino - where he was then tasered in front of a group of children.

Smith claims he was a Terminator sent back in time from the future - a reference to the film character made popular by Arnold Schwarznegger in the sci-fi franchise. The films usually start with a naked man being transported to the past.

However, it turned out that Smith was not a time-traveling Terminator but was in fact suffering from the effects of LSD and marijuana. He was charged with indecent exposure and resisting a police officer.

Calorie counts on food labels around the world are based on a system developed in the late 19th century by American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater. Atwater calculated the energy content of various foods by burning small samples in controlled conditions and measuring the amount of energy released in the form of heat. To estimate the proportion of this raw energy that was used by the body, Atwater calculated the amount of energy lost as undigested food in faeces, and as chemical energy in the form of urea, ammonia and organic acids found in urine, and then he subtracted these figures from the total. Using this method, Atwater estimated that carbohydrates and protein provide an average of 4 kcal per gram, while fat provides 9 kcal per gram. With a few modifications, these measurements of what is known as metabolisable energy have been the currency of food ever since.

We know these values are approximate. Nutritionists are well aware that our bodies don't incinerate food, they digest it. And digestion - from chewing food to moving it through the gut and chemically breaking it down along the way - takes a different amount of energy for different foods. According to Geoffrey Livesey, an independent nutritionist based in Norfolk, UK, this can lower the number of calories your body extracts from a meal by anywhere between 5 and 25 per cent depending on the food eaten. "These energy costs are quite significant," he says, yet are not reflected on any food label.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. officials are weighing a plan to let borrowers who have fallen behind on mortgage payments avoid eviction by renting their home instead, sources familiar with the administration's thinking said on Tuesday.

Under one idea being discussed, delinquent homeowners would surrender ownership of their homes, but would continue to live in the property for several years, the sources told Reuters.

A U.S. Treasury spokeswoman said late on Tuesday that "we are constantly reviewing new ways to help struggling homeowners and stabilize the housing market. This is just one idea among many that has been considered, but no decisions are imminent on the matter."

Officials have been frustrated as red tape and rising interest rates have slowed a housing rescue plan announced in February that was meant to refinance the mortgages of 5 million borrowers and lower monthly payments for 4 million more.

Signs are appearing in Europe that the Israeli hawks are finding it more difficult to operate with impunity. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military attack on virtually defenseless Gaza last winter appears to have wrought significant damage on Israel's image and standing, and opened it to punitive measures and even boycotts in Europe, unlike previous military misadventures. I suspect that the sheer helplessness of the Gazans helps explain the bad odor in which Israel increasingly finds itself.

The United Kingdom has revoked 5 export licenses for weapons to Israel out of concern that the naval equipment already sold to the latter was misused against civilians during the Gaza War, and might be again. The move won't exactly bring Tel Aviv to its knees, but it has a symbolic import, since no similar measures were taken after the Israeli use of cluster bombs against the farms (and farmers) of southern Lebanon in 2006.

The UK also disallowed an Israeli advertisement to tourists that showed the West Bank and Gaza as already incorporated into Israel.

A La Crosse woman is accused of stabbing her boyfriend Tuesday afternoon after she caught him watching pornography and masturbating, according to La Crosse police reports.

Rachel Ferrara, 23, found her 24-year-old boyfriend inside her home at 920 Cameron Ave., No. 4, about 3:30 p.m., reports stated.
The couple argued and Ferrara accused the man of being a “(expletive) cheater,” reports stated. She punched him twice in the abdomen and kicked him in the groin, police said.

Ferrara then backed the man into the kitchen, where she grabbed a 5-inch serrated knife and slashed his arms before stabbing him in the abdomen, according to reports.

NBC will be hunting terrorists in a new reality show: "THE WANTED." The show teams a 60 Minutes producer (who also worked as a lawyer for the CIA), a former NAVY SEAL, a former Green Beret, a reporter and a war crimes prosecutor to hunt terrorists alive and well and living among us.

Like a cross between "To Catch a Predator," the NBC Dateline series that confronted accused sex offenders on live TV, and Jack Bauer's "24." Bringing the mainstream media's commercial exploitation of geopolitical fear and internecine xenophobia to entirely new, PKDickian levels. The preview, linked above, is a masterpiece of unintentional self-parody. Simultaneously so hilarious and so horrifying that I fear my Zeitgeist irony governor may now be permanently damaged.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a host of “rape romances” that are routinely sneered at by younger romance readers and/or people young to romance reading. The device is that the hero is cruel, arrogant, and (as I saw in a comment about my favorite one, written in 1974) he “rapes her until she loves him.”
Sounds harsh now, right?
Let me put this in some context. In the early 1970s, a lady named Nancy Friday interviewed women on the subject of their sexual fantasies and published them in a couple of books: My Secret Garden (1973) and Forbidden Flowers (1975), just at the cusp of the “rape romance.” Without taking Friday’s scholarship into account, I find it interesting that many women’s fantasies at that time featured rape prominently. I also find it fascinating that these books were published nearly simultaneously with the early rape romances and thus, probably didn’t inform each other.
And then came the soap General Hospital in 1979, with Luke and Laura, which is, as far as I can tell, the most famous rape romance ever.

As science-fiction film director James Cameron ("Aliens," "Terminator," "Titanic") has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists "as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains." That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture — no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics. To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science — heavily influenced by politics and mass media — and that's a very different matter.

...

What do we learn from this curriculum about science? Well, just ask America's kids. Researchers who have studied the stereotypical views of scientists held by American schoolchildren report that when they encounter real-life scientists who visit their classroom, the kids think someone's pulling their leg, because the scientists aren't anything like the big-screen version — mean, male, gray haired and mad. As one study author explained to the magazine Nature: "They might say the person was too 'normal' or too good-looking to be a scientist. The most heart-breaking thing is when they say, 'I didn't think he was real because he seemed to care about us.'"

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) – A U.N. court trying the architects of Rwanda's 1994 genocide jailed a former Kigali governor for life on five counts including ordering the killing of 60 Tutsi boys in a church-run pastoral center.
The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had indicted Tharcisse Renzaho of genocide, complicity in genocide, murder and rape in the massacres in which 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.
The court found him guilty of all except complicity in genocide.

Scabies mite (Sarcoptes scabiei var. hominis)

Commonly known as the human itch mite, the parasite is transferred by physical contact.

The female mite lays her eggs on the skin of a human, causing a reaction and inflammation.

This is exacerbated when the mother begins burying the eggs under the skin causing intense itching, a condition commonly known as scabies.

Symptoms: itching, soreness, pus-filled nodules, skin irritation

The traditional throwing of a bride's bouquet for luck ended in disaster at an Italian wedding when the flowers caused a plane to crash.
The bride and groom had hired a small plane to fly past and throw the bouquet to a line of women guests, Corriere della Sera reported.
However, the flowers were sucked into the plane's engine causing it to catch fire and explode.

File this in the can't win for trying department: Multivitamins may be bad for your health.
A new study by Consumer Lab found that many multivitamins contain potentially dangerous levels of lead, and many did not contain the vitamins and minerals their labels proclaim.
Lead is especially dangerous to fetuses and small children, which is seriously bad news for pregnant women who take fistfuls of prenatal vitamins in hopes of a healthy baby.
Almost no vitamins were found to be free of lead, according to the Sacramento Bee (the study results are by subscription only). Indeed, lead-free may be an impossible goal because fruits and vegetables absorb lead from soil and water.

Ever since he learned how to walk, three-year-old Demetrius Jones's family has had to keep a close eye on the toddler when there are cars nearby. The boy's fixation with anything on four wheels earned him the nickname “Tire Man” among relatives, after his habit of carefully inspecting rims and tread. And his curiosity occasionally gets the adventurous roamer into trouble.

“If a car's unlocked, it's fair game to him,” says his grandmother, Anita Neudorf.

And on Sunday morning, Demetrius's fondness for cars got him into some very deep trouble. The boy wandered off from his parents' campsite near Taylor, B.C., with his prized toy, a motorized truck. While no one was looking, Demetrius angled his truck down a steep boat launch into the Peace River and suddenly found himself caught in the swift current, clinging to the toy as he was swept 12 kilometres downstream.

Incredibly, when rescuers caught up to Demetrius two hours later he was unscathed – cold, but still gripping his floating truck.

The strange reality of the Web is that it's harder to display a novel font than it is to embed a video. In this realm, at least, print media are still way ahead. Flip open your favorite glossy magazine and behold the typographic bounty—the text sizes that range from the microscopic to the gargantuan, the huge variety of font weights and styles, and the thrillingly large universe of different typefaces. Compared with the typical issue of Cosmo, Slate and every other online magazine look like something out of the 1800s.

Typeface designers and font fanciers have new reason for optimism though. The past year has seen a surge of Web-browser innovation. Now, most major browsers—including the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera—recognize a CSS rule known as @font-face. What that means, in brief, is that Web developers can now easily embed downloadable fonts in their pages. To see an example, load up Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4 and check out this site. You'll see three new typefaces—Liza, Auto, and Dolly—used in the body text and headlines.

The leaflet carries the slogan "an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away". It also says: "Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes' physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?"

Steve Slack, the director of the Centre for HIV and Sexual Health at NHS Sheffield, who is one of the leaflet's authors, says that instead of promoting teenage sex, it could encourage young people to delay losing their virginity until they are certain they will enjoy the experience.

Mr Slack believes that if teenagers are fully informed about sex and are making their decisions of their own will in a loving relationship, they have an equal right as an adult to an enjoyable sex life.

U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, set to deploy to Afghanistan, says he shouldn’t have to go.

His reason?

Barack Obama was never eligible to be president because he wasn’t born in the United States.

Actually, Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, two years after it became a state.

Cook’s lawyer, Orly Taitz, who has also challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency in other courts, filed a request last week in federal court seeking a temporary restraining order and status as a conscientious objector for his client.

WINCHESTER, Tenn. — The spacious home where the newly wed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses. The Holts’ three babies were ghostlike and listless, with breathing problems that called for respirators, repeated trips to the emergency room and, for the middle child, Anna, the heaviest dose of steroids a toddler can take.

Ms. Holt, a nurse, developed migraines. She and her husband, a factory worker, had kidney ailments.

It was not until February, more than five years after they moved in, that the couple discovered the root of their troubles: their house, across the road from a cornfield in this town some 70 miles south of Nashville, was contaminated with high levels of methamphetamine left by the previous occupant, who had been dragged from the attic by the police.

The Holts’ next realization was almost as devastating: it was up to them to spend the $30,000 or more that cleanup would require.

One of the bill's provisions is a requirement that those who visit an abortion provider wait 24 hours before getting an abortion. The visit would have to include disclosures by doctors in person about the procedure, risks and alternatives, and the fetus' probable characteristics.

Also, an existing law on parental approval for minors seeking to end pregnancies would be toughened. In addition, pharmacists and other health care providers will be able to refuse to hand out emergency contraception on moral or religious grounds.

Former Gov. Janet Napolitano, who was governor for six years, vetoed all bills sent to her that restricted abortion rights. Brewer replaced her in January.

Masked and hooded Belfast Catholics hurled gasoline bombs, fireworks and other makeshift weapons at police all night Monday as the most bitterly divisive day on the Northern Ireland calendar reached an ugly end.

Several rioters and at least nine officers were injured, none seriously, when Irish nationalists in Ardoyne, a militant Catholic enclave of north Belfast, tried to block a parade by the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's major Protestant brotherhood.

Tens of thousands of Orangemen spent Monday mounting hundreds of similar parades in an annual stress test for the province's fragile peace. Most passed peacefully, but a handful attracted violent protests that Catholic leaders blamed on Irish Republican Army dissidents opposed to Northern Ireland's joint Catholic-Protestant government.

The first full-time female FBI agent stationed at the US prison in Guantanamo, Bay, Cuba says she witnessed a drunken “spring break” atmosphere during her tenure — and has photographs to prove it.

In a little noticed complaint Friday, the 43-year-old agent, Theresa Foley, alleges that she experienced a “generally sexist, discriminatory and ‘boys club’ atmosphere” during her time at Camp Delta in Cuba and that she contracted a permanent debilitating disease as a result of being forced to sleep in rat-infested quarters. Foley is suing the Justice Department over her illness and purported sexual harassment.

Her illness has led to a hysterectomy and spinal collapse.

After learning from neighbors that the three-bedroom ranch-style home had been a known “drug house,” the family had it tested. The air ducts had meth levels more than 100 times higher than the most commonly cited limit beyond which cleanup is typically required.

The former owner had marked “no” on a disclosure form asking whether the house had ever been a meth lab, Ms. Rodriguez said. But because he is now in prison for meth possession, among other things, the Rodriguezes decided there was nothing to gain by suing him. They moved out, throwing away most of their possessions because they could not be cleaned, and are letting the house go into foreclosure.

“It makes you crazy,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “Our credit is ruined, we won’t be able to buy another house, somebody exposed my kids to meth, and my dog died.”

This is a bigger deal than might appear at first glance. Any computation can be expressed as a Boolean circuit: a series of additions and multiplications. Your computer consists of a zillion Boolean circuits, and you can run programs to do anything on your computer. This algorithm means you can perform arbitrary computations on homomorphically encrypted data. More concretely: if you encrypt data in a fully homomorphic cryptosystem, you can ship that encrypted data to an untrusted person and that person can perform arbitrary computations on that data without being able to decrypt the data itself. Imagine what that would mean for cloud computing, or any outsourcing infrastructure: you no longer have to trust the outsourcer with the data.

They like pork more than any other meat just because the Tatars hate it.

They believe that going to bed with a Danish or English woman is a great sin, but don’t think that it’s a sin when a harlot (Piccadillo), a Russian prostitute, sells herself to a foreigner, as her offspring would be born in the true Old faith.

Russians like rye more than wheat, and prefer fetid fish to fresh one.

They count their miles not by hundreds, but by nineties.

Now in Russia they have 7060 year anno mundi. They are more likely to believe tales than true and highly probable things.
They like to write on their knees, even when there is a table just next to them.

When they sew, they hold the needle with the sharp end turned to them, so they might be bad tailors.

They are more likely to believe a word of a man who has a beard, than to an oath of another one without a beard.

They believe that only fat women are really pretty.