The rabbit, know being called Susan by the people caring for her, was found in Buckhaven, Fife, with both of her ears cut off.

Kenny Sharpe, Scottish SPCA assistant manager , said that doing such a thing to the rabbit would have caused it a great deal of pain and suffering, but that the folks at the SPCA are taking good care of her until they can find a loving home for her.

“Both her ears have been cropped off, which is highly unusual. The vet who examined her thinks they were cut off with a pair of scissors in a malicious attack as it is extremely rare for both ears to be removed for medical reasons. This would have caused Susan a great deal of pain and suffering and we can only imagine how frightened she must have been.”

He added: “Thankfully, this is an old injury which has healed and Susan seems to cope well. Susan is very friendly and trusting of humans, despite the obvious trauma she has been caused in the past. This gorgeous girl has clearly not had a great start in life and we’d really like to find her an owner who can show her the love and care she deserves.”

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

There is no word if the authorities have any clue as to who would do this but I know I would have a suggestion as what they could use the scissors for if they ever do catch the disgusting excuse of a human being  who did this.

Make it dull scissors.

And rusty scissors.

Family court and criminal court vary tremendously in scope and in which rights are afforded those who stand before judges, and a recent case where a man was forced to apologize to his estranged wife via Facebook has caused some concern about free speech in general.

The details of the case are not entirely open to press due to privacy statutes surrounding cases relating to child custody and the like, but back in November, Ohio resident Mark Byron updated his Facebook status to read:

“If you are an evil, vindictive woman who wants to ruin your husband’s life and take your son’s father away from him completely- all you need to do is say you’re scared of your husband or domestic partner and they’ll take him away.”

While Byron’s comments were privacy-locked so his wife (the mother of the man’s 17-month-old son) could not see them, an Ohio judge found that the comments violated a protective order. Byron- who maintains that his wife Elizabeth does not adhere to a custody order mandating he receive twice-weekly visits with his son- was given a choice to either apologize to his estranged spouse in the midst of their bitter divorce publicly on Facebook, or head to jail for 60 days.

Lawyers for Byron and other lawyers not involved in the case have cited First Amendment protections as well as the idea that judicial intervention to compel speech is just as disturbing as restriction of freedom of speech. Becky Ford, a lawyer for Byron, commented:

“In a million years I didn’t think he’d be found in contempt… He did nothing but vent. She didn’t like what he had to say. That’s what this boils down to.”

As the post was made in a place where Byron’s wife was deliberately excluded from viewing the commentary, an argument can likely be made that she sought out the man’s Facebook page- perhaps even for an edge in court. Do you think a judge should have any say over what individuals can and cannot say on their own Facebook pages?

As Facebook grows ever more a part of socializing among people worldwide, so too do Facebook etiquette protocols and considerations about how to transfer real-life interactions over to the service.

Psychology and sociology researchers are breaking it down and finding Facebook impacts our self-perception in ways we might not predict, and crimes that germinated on the social network seem to be increasing in frequency due to the ubiquity of Facebook in general. One of the bigger questions about Facebook use and politeness deals with when to delete or block friends and the relation of Facebook to privacy in general, and a new study reveals that users are manning the parapets and tightening up their Facebook profiles against prying eyes- even those of friends.

Facebook deletion is a big etiquette question mark- apps exist to pinpoint who has given you the elbow from access to their Facebook page, though not everyone thinks knowing such information is helpful- and a new report from the Pew Research Center in Washington has found that Facebook users are becoming hella more selective in who gets to see their goodies. 63% of users report unfriending, 44% have removed comments made by friends on their Facebook pages, and 37% have untagged themselves in photos, presumably people who have posed next to my best friend Katie who always looks insufferably thin and shiny-haired.

58% of users use the highest level of privacy settings to ensure information leaks stay at a minimum, with 67% of female users and 48% of male users reporting the practice. However, one in two Facebook users admit that Facebook’s privacy settings aren’t entirely clear to them just yet and they’ve not got a handle on profile lockdown.

The survey, released Friday, polled nearly 2,300 Facebook users in all age demographics.

A maternity ward may not seem an obvious spot for a major kerfuffle, but the son of Robert F. Kennedy has been charged with child endangerment after a bizarre scuffle with two nurses in a Westchester hospital following the birth of his son last month.

Douglas Kennedy maintains he was taking his three-day-old son Boru out for some fresh air when the incident on January 7th went down- when two nurses on the maternity ward attempted to stop the Fox News broadcaster. Kennedy (whose wife was in the hospital recovering from a c-section) is said to have kicked one of the nurses in the crotch and twisted the other’s wrist, but a doctor at the hospital who witnessed the incident has defended Kennedy.

62-year-old Dr. Timothy Haydock was present and says of the spat:

“I witnessed the incident and I can state unequivocally that the nurses were the only aggressors.”

Kennedy, who has four other children, has commented on the arrest and the incident as a whole, saying:

“We are sickened by the fact that our simple desire to take our healthy baby son out for a walk has been warped into child endangerment. Nobody should try grab a baby from a parent’s arms, as these nurses tied to do.”

A lawyer for Kennedy said a suit the nurses intend to bring is simply a “a money grab.”

The creative genius of Bill Watterson shined through on Thursday when one of the artists watercolor’s sold for $107,550.

The work in question was one of the comic strip creators watercolor portrayals of his famous Calvin & Hobbes paintings which he finished in the late-’80s.

Watterson ended his comic strip in the mid-90′s and the watercolor was used in a 1989-1990 calendar however Watterson held onto the original work for part of his own Calvin & Hobbes collection.

It wasn’t until 2011 that Bill Watterson released his first public art in more than 15 years, that work was a contribution to Team Cul de Sac, a fundraising organization supporting the fight against Parkinson’s disease.

Do you think an original Calvin & Hobbes watercolor is worth more than $100,000?

A new study has found that despite our best efforts to like someone for who they are we find it easier to like people who have easy to pronounce names.

Published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in December the study’s co-author reveals:

“When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it’s easier to comprehend, we come to like it more,”

The idea of “Fluency” or the fact that the brain favors easy to process information started in the 1960s and researchers for the new study used that theory to examine how we perceive people with easy to pronounce names.

The study found that people can partly predict a persons education and income level based on the ability to pronounce their first name.

The study also found that boys with girl names are more likely to be suspended from school and a child with a less popular and easy to pronounce name is more likely to be a delinquent.

To determine how much a pronunciation of a name guides perception the researchers used the following names.

Researchers then asked 19 female and 16 male college students to rank those name and 50 surnames according to their ease or difficulty of pronunciation, and according to how much they liked or disliked them.

In the second study they had 17 females and 7 male students rank hypothetical political candidates based on just their names.

A third part of the project asked 55 female and 19 male students to vote on candidates bout whom they knew both names and some political positions.

According to researchers a name’s pronounceability, regardless of length or seeming foreignness, mattered most in determining likability.

Do you think the ability to pronounce someones name can really make people like them more or less?

I have always been a dog type of guy even though I’ve also had my fair share of cats as well and the idea that anyone would do what these two is absolutely reprehensible.

It seems that a mother and her son put their rottweiler and Staffordshire bull terrier type dogs in their attic and then nailed a board across the opening to make it difficult for the dogs to get out, and make it hard for anyone to care for them as well.

They were found later without any bedding, clean air, food or water.

As a result of this inhumane treatment the dogs ended up dying and the RSPCA officer who visited the home said the smell of rotting flesh grew stronger the more stairs you climbed. A vet who examined the dogs said that they had died from starvation and dehydration; as well he said anyone would have been able to notice the horrendous conditions and suffering the dogs were living under.

After pleading guilty to the charges the pair were sentenced to four months each and handed a lifetime ban from owning any animal for life.

via Telegraph & Argus

Most of us like t o spend a Sunday morning enjoying a nice brunch and some quiet reflective time with no one to bother us; which means the last place you would want to be is at a hospital.

However for those of you who weren’t unlucky enough to be visiting the Anchorage Providence Alaska Medical Center this past Sunday missed out on being able to spend some quality time with a moose.

Now of course with this hospital being up in the wilds of Alaska the idea of seeing a live moose doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. Hell they even show up in the parking garage of the hospital time to time according Ginger Houghton, community relations specialist at the hospital.

However this time this moose visitor decided that it was time to give the hospital a closer inspection and thanks to the automatic door opening setup at the hospital the moose just sauntered in and in the end made it as far as the third floor of the hospital, all with some hospital security to make sure no-one got hurt, moose included.

Here’s a video of the wandering moose.

via Alaska Dispatch

Oh, you’re not still using Pinterest, are you? Everyone is totally on The Fancy now.

Okay, it’s not that bad- Pinterest is still blazing a massive trail through the social web and gaining scads of new users every day. But The Fancy is similar and gaining on Pinterest, with a slightly different methodology- both from an end user standpoint and for the business end of things.

Apparently, according to founder Joe Einhorn, The Fancy works kind of like a “reverse Groupon.” The Business Insider explains:

“Instead of Groupon where the company tells you what to buy and the price, people can decide what they want and merchants can fill that demand with a self-service bid system.”

For users, the difference is somewhat aesthetic, and somewhat performance related. Many of the products listed are indeed fancy, although the moniker seems to stem from the more British usage of the word- items that catch your eye can be “fancied” and collected. And there is where one of the main advantages over Pinterest that’s immediately palpable comes into play- fancied items are automagically categorized and fancy as they may be (floating hot tubs, granite bathrooms with multiple showerheads, expensive booze), the system seems to separate them out with stunning accuracy.

While it’s a bit early to see if The Fancy will catch on as well as Pinterest has for users, stats indicate that behaviors indicate a slightly more mindful base of users that make the competition look like a bit of a re-pinning orgy. VentureBeat breaks down the stats:

Pinterest: 11,000,000 registered users with 32,400,000 pins.
The Fancy: 250,000 registered users with 16,700,000 fancies.

That’s 66.8 fancies, or dare we say “pins” per person, on The Fancy versus approximately 3 per person on Pinterest.  The Fancy has also had 1 million fancies in the last 7 days (150,000/day) and 100-200,000 unique visitors per day.

It’s also entirely possible that both services will occupy different spaces- The Fancy is far less accessible than Pinterest, with the latter trafficking in lots of folksy, home-y type pins and fancies tending to be of the haute design ilk. Still, the likeliest outcome of all is more of us sinking time into additional, addictive services. Have you pitted The Fancy against Pinterest yet?

If you dabble in Tumblr at all, chances are you’ve seen a “thinspo” post come across your feed at some point or another.

For the uninitiated, the term is a shibboleth for the “pro-ana” (anorexic) community, shorthand for “thinspiration,” and meant to encourage the mostly-female devotees to essentially starve themselves. The phenomenon is not new, and posts of the same ilk have been showing up on the similar service Pinterest lately with alarming frequency- while dieting and fitness are common topics, thinspo posts tend to foreground visible hip and rib bones or otherwise glorify self-harm.

But on Tumblr from now on, users will be hitting some roadblocks when attempting to share content categorized as “thinspo”- in a post on the official Tumblr blog, the site explained:

One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression. People being people, though, that means that Tumblr sometimes gets used for things that are just wrong. We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech, but we do draw some limits… Our Content Policy has not, until now, prohibited blogs that actively promote self-harm.

The post continues:

These typically take the form of blogs that glorify or promote anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders; self-mutilation; or suicide. These are messages and points of view that we strongly oppose, and don’t want to be hosting. The question for us has been whether it’s better to (a)prohibit them, as a statement against the very ideas of self-harm that they are advancing, or (b) permit them to stay up, accompanied by a public service warning that directs readers to helplines run by organizations like the National Eating Disorders Association.

It seems the ban is very much a work in progress at the moment, but it hasn’t quelled user reaction, with about half being for the ban and the other half freaking out about where they will find their images of emaciated women. Do you agree with Tumblr’s thinspo ban?

In what might potentially be the worse use of research money in the history of man a group of scientists have determined that smoking marijuana leads to decreased motivation at work.

While researchers were able to make that connection they still aren’t sure if smoking pot leads to a lack of motivation (it did for many people I knew in college) or if pot smokers were already a bit more chilled out to being with.

In some cases it’s believed that people turn to smoking pot because of their jobs which in turn means they were already unmotivated by their workplace.

Researcher Christer Hyggen tells Reuters:

“There’s a popular belief that people who smoke cannabis are slackers and that they don’t want to work.”

In answering the study’s questionnaire people who smoked marijuana also reported less dedication to work than non-smokers.

The study also found that people who quit smoking cannabis eventually increase their work commitment.

Do you think this study was a complete waste of money?

Dallas judge Tonya Parker will conduct marriage ceremonies but only if you’re a male-male or female-female couple. It was revealed this week by the Dallas Voice that the gay judge is refusing to perform straight marriage ceremonies until every other gay person in Texas has the same right.

When turning straight couples away the judge tells them:

“I’m sorry. I don’t perform marriage ceremonies because we are in a state that does not have marriage equality, and until it does, I am not going to partially apply the law to one group of people that doesn’t apply to another group of people.”

Parker is kind to those that show up at her office and instead of turning them away completely she passes them on to other judges so they can get married.

Parker tells the Voice:

“It’s kind of oxymoronic for me to perform ceremonies that can’t be performed for me, so I’m not going to do it.”

For her part Tonya Parker can’t be charged with anything because the  Texas Committee on Judicial Ethics deems wedding to be a  ”discretionary function” that can not interfere with “mandatory judicial duties.”

In any case I think Parker makes a very valid point, why should she have to preside over the exact type of legal ceremony she’s not allowed to enact for herself.

Do you think more gay judges should refuse to perform straight marriage ceremonies until laws in each state allow for gay marriage ceremonies to take place?

Now I wouldn’t normally equate either Twitter or Facebook as being sexy but it seems that the crew at Euro RSCG Worldwide have found that when it comes to the users of the two services one group of users is sexier than the other.

Yup the secret is out folks – Twitter has more sexy users than Facebook does, but that really shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering show many young people are still cringing for the friend requests from their parents on Facebook.

I of course wouldn’t place too much faith in the breakdown here in the infographic but you might get a few chuckles out of it so enjoy.

via TechVibes

Greek yogurt- basically the only worthwhile kind of yogurt- is the newest hot ingredient picked up by premium ice cream brand for a new line of flavors.

The new initiative boasts four Greek yogurt flavors, all of which straddle an impressive line between yogurt-y and dessert. The options are, per a press release:

Strawberry Shortcake: Strawberry Greek Frozen Yogurt with Shortbread Pieces
Raspberry Fudge Chunk: Raspberry Greek Frozen Yogurt with Fudge Chunks
Banana Peanut Butter: Banana Greek Frozen Yogurt with Peanut Butter Swirls
Blueberry Vanilla Graham: Blueberry & Vanilla Greek Frozen Yogurt with Graham Cracker Swirls

While the frozen treats are not exactly health food, the flavors do have fewer calories and more protein than standard Ben & Jerry’s flavors, and the release says that the new Ben & Jerry’s Greek yogurt pints “[reap] the benefits of containing real Greek yogurt.” Ben & Jerry’s rep Kirsten Schimoler commented in the new release:

“They’re refreshing, they’re fruity, and they are exactly the taste that fans expect from Ben & Jerry’s… We have worked hard to create the best, tasty, euphoric, chunky, swirly Ben & Jerry’s version of Greek Frozen Yogurt and we think its pretty Greekin’ good- we think you’ll agree.”

It was not explicitly stated whether the Ben & Jerry’s Greek yogurt flavors will be available in pints only or in scoop shops as well.

Quick, where’s the nearest wall because this is just so inanely stupid I can’t believe it. I mean what church in their right mind would employ, or take on as a volunteer, a convicted child molester as their new pastor.

Except that is exactly what has happened in Jacksonville at the Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist church who decided that it would be just fine to hire Darrell Gilyard after he had been convicted and jailed for three years for abusing a 15-year-old girl at another church in 2009. Not to mention as well that part of the terms of his early release was that he was not to be allowed any kind of contact with minor children.

Parishioners claim security guards hired by the church have begun refusing admission to families with children, including a woman who tried to attend on Sunday with a two-year-old boy.

Instead, they say, children are directed to remain “off site” while Gilyard is preaching, and they accuse the church of dismantling its playground to keep them away.

Since Gilyard was hired last month, soon after his December release from jail, the church in Northside, one of Jacksonville’s poorest, mostly black neighbourhoods, has become the scene of angry exchanges between protesters and his supporters.

via Guardian

Other pastors in the area have condemn Deacon Paul S Newman, chairman of the church ministry, for hiring Gilyard ion the first place and say that the man has no place near women or children, especially considering his past problems prior to the 2009 incident.¸

If you’re considering taking the leap from full-time on-site employment to freelancing, Master’sDegree.net put together this infographic illustrating the pitfalls (and upsides!) of becoming a free agent.

Well color me pink but it seems that not everything to do with Facebook is all rosy, at least according to the recently released 2012 State of Style Report from StyleCaster.

For their report StyleCaster polled some 1,500 men and women between the ages of 16 and 37 to find out what the consumer trends are going forward for the year, as well StyleCast did some data mining of Sociocast’s database of more than 200 million consumers and added that to the mix.

One of the interesting things to come out of the report though was regarding Facebook and their omnipresent Like button.

What StyleCast found was that 25% of women were less likely to purchase a Spanx product if there was a Facebook Like button beside it, but on the flip side 25% were more likely to purchase some trendy item like a fancy perfume in the same scenario.

Now flip the genders and 25% of men are less likely to buy Cleasasil if there is a Facebook Like button beside it but do exactly the opposite if the product is athletic shorts.

The idea here is that you may want to take a second look at the product you are buying and think again about sharing with the wider world that you just bought those size 6 shoes.

via The Next Web