Next time your mom tells you the Internet is pointless, show her this: Chinese media is reporting that a 600-year-old dog-eating carnival in Qianxi Township, Jinhua City, has been shut down for goodafter public outrage “voiced on the Internet” led officials to reconsider the festival’s merits.
The cruel nature of the annual event, which involves slaughtering and skinning dogs in the streets, was exposed on the web ahead of its October start date, sparking an outcry.
Local lore has it that area dogs were killed by the Ming Dynasty’s founder prior to the sacking of the town in order to keep them from revealing his troop’s movements. Dog meat was then served to celebrate the army’s victory, and an annual tradition of snacking on dog meat had been observed ever since.
Public butchering of canines by vendors intended to prove the meat was fresh led to protestations on popular social network sites, and, ultimately, to the tradition’s demise.
A week after the “occupation” of Wall Street began with a “Day of Rage,” the peaceful demonstration took a turn for the violent as tensions between police and protesters boiled over.
Between 80 and 100 members of the so-called “99 percent” were arrested for impeding traffic; some were charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. According to protest spokesman Patrick Bruner, the police response was “exceedingly violent.”
Bruner’s claim appears to be confirmed in footage from the Financial District and surrounding areas showing mostly unprovoked altercations between NYPD officers and demonstrators.
“I was shocked because it seemed like one person after another was being brutally tackled, and it wasn’t clear why,” rally attendee Meaghan Linick told theNew York Daily News. “I was deeply disturbed to see them throw a man [down] and immediately they were pounding on him. Their arms were going back in the air. I couldn’t believe how violent five people needed to be against one unarmed man.”
Perhaps the most egregious incident involving excessive force came after NYPD officers began kettling protesters with orange police nets. In a video posted to YouTube, a uniformed officer can clearly be seen approaching a corralled group of women and macing them without warning or provocation, before quickly leaving the scene (see below).
In a statement to CBS New York, the NYPD said every arrest made was “justified.” The official Occupy Wall Street website is demanding jail time for the police officer responsible for pepper spraying the barricaded women.
Ironically, by attempting to curb the protesters’ continued Wall Street presence, the police may have unwittingly supplied the “diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty byproducts of wayward capitalism” with the “infusion of energy” they had long hoped for.
Further Reading/Viewing: Photos: 1 2, Videos: 1 2 3, Twitter, Facebook,LiveStream.
^ Food for Instant Heart Attack
As you move through the world or you watch a movie, a dynamic, ever-changing pattern of activity is evoked in the brain. The goal of movie reconstruction is to use the evoked activity to recreate the movie you observed. To do this, we create encoding models that describe how movies are transformed into brain activity, and then we use those models to decode brain activity and reconstruct the stimulus.
For the last 500 years, the locals of Nongriat in Meghalaya, India have grown several hundred bridges across the region’s numerous water channels. Some of the bridges extend over 100 feet in length and are strong enough to support more than 50 people at a time.
During the First World War a pigeon named Cher Ami (Dear friend) saved the lives of many French soldiers by carrying a message across enemy lines in the heat of battle. Cher Ami was shot in the chest and the leg, loosing most of the leg to which the message was attached, but continued the 25 minute flight avoiding shrapnel and poison gas to get the message home. Cher Ami was awarded the French ‘Croix de Guerre’ for heroic service.
The Tollund Man is the naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the time period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950 buried in a peat bog on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, which preserved his body. Such a find is known as a bog body.
The head and face were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim.
This painting appeared on eBay in February 2000. According to the seller, the aforementioned couple, the painting carried some form of curse. Their eBay description claimed that the characters in the painting moved during the night, and that they would sometimes leave the painting and enter the room in which it was being displayed.
Included with the listing were a series of photographs that were said to be evidence of an incident in which the female doll character threatened the male character with a gun that she was holding, causing him to attempt to leave the painting.
Wangari Maathai, savior of trees, dies
Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday after a long struggle with ovarian cancer.
Watch a video here, where Wangari Maathai speaks of her work with The Nature Conservancy.
Wangari Maathai, Thank you for all your passion and hard work.
a place to mend the hearts of everyone who feels alone 