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Italian police say they have arrested a man for forcing his daughter to have sex with him for 25 years, prompting comparisons with the high-profile case of Austria's Josef Fritzl.
The 64-year-old junk dealer had allegedly raped his daughter, now 34, regularly since she was nine years old, deputy prosecutor Pietro Forno of the northern city of Turin told AFP.
'Italy's Fritzl' arrested
A man was arrested in Italy for allegedly sexually abusing his daughter over a 25 year period and encouraging his son to do the same.
He was arrested a few days ago, while his son, 41, has been in police custody since last month accused of raping his four daughters, Forno said.
Both the father and the son have strongly denied the allegations against them, the ANSA news agency reported.
Erroneous press reports, giving the older man's victim the pseudonym Laura, earlier said he had also imprisoned his daughter.
Austrian Josef Fritzl received a life sentence last week for the repeated rape of his daughter over 24 years during which he kept her in an underground hideaway and fathered seven children with her.
Forno said Laura "was strictly speaking free, though she did nothing without her father, who completely dominated her psychologically".
Laura was the eldest of 10 children, Forno said, adding that "according to a family rule, the eldest daughter was reserved" for the father, a native of southern Italy.
"The young woman is suffering from personality disorders because of the prolonged incestuous situation and mistreatment," he said.
"A psychiatric evaluation has determined that the situation was one of very serious distress."
Laura had a "totally passive personality before her father, who made her live in a climate of threats", Forno said, adding that she stayed in a dark room and had not been to school since she was 13 years old.
The mother was part of the household, which was home to three of the other children including one with a physical handicap.
"It appeared to be a normal family," Forno said, adding that no evidence of abuse towards the other children had emerged.
The father's other children, eight boys and a girl, defended him.
"My father never touched us. I kiss the ground where he passed," said the victim's sister, quoted by the Ansa news agency.
The father "passed his behaviour on to one of his sons", Forno said.
The son is accused of having raped and abused his four daughters, now aged six, 12, 17 and 21, and forcing them to watch the sex sessions.
The investigation began last October, when Laura lodged a complaint against her brother, accusing him of holding her prisoner and raping her for two weeks after she fled to his home following an argument with their father.
The probe involved phone taps on the family home and the use of electronic listening devices.
The five alleged victims are under psychological care at a shelter.
A cyber spy network based mainly in China has tapped into classified documents from government and private organizations in 103 countries, including the computers of Tibetan exiles, Canadian researchers said Saturday.
The work of the Information Warfare Monitor initially focused on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan community in exile, especially the Dalai Lama, who is frequently denounced by Chinese officials.
The research eventually led to a much wider network of compromised machines, the Internet-based research group said.
Information Warfare Monitor is a joint effort of the SecDev Group in Ottawa and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
The group said in a news release Sunday that investigators conducted field research in India, Europe and North America, including in the private office of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government-in-exile and several Tibetan NGOs.
Investigator Greg Walton said: "We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama."
During the second phase of the investigation, the data led to the discovery of insecure, web-based interfaces to four control servers. The interfaces allow attackers to send instructions to and receive data from compromised computers.
"What we found is not so much unprecedented in scope and sophistication," said Nart Villeneuve, a senior IWM analyst.
"But the relatively small size of the network and concentration of high-value targets is significant. It does not fit the profile for a typical cyber crime network."
Principal investigators Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski said: "This report serves as a wake-up call."
"At the very least, the large percentage of high-value targets compromised by this network demonstrates the relative ease with which a technically unsophisticated approach can quickly be harnessed to create a very effective spynet."
The compromised computers included, among many others, the ministry of foreign affairs of Iran; the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan; the ASEAN Secretariat; the Asian Development Bank; news organizations and an unclassified computer located at NATO headquarters.
The research group said while its analysis points to China as the main source of the network, it has not conclusively been able to detect the exact identity or motivation of the hackers.
A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved.
The researchers said they have notified international law-enforcement agencies of the spying operation.
The F.B.I. declined comment on the operation.
The full report of the investigation entitled, "Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network," was released online Sunday.
A Thai fireman turned superhero when he dressed up as comic-book character Spider-Man to coax a frightened eight-year-old from a balcony, police said.
Teachers at a special needs school in Bangkok alerted authorities when an autistic pupil, scared of going to lessons, sat out on the third-floor ledge and refused to come inside, a police sergeant told AFP.
Despite teachers' efforts to beckon the boy inside, he refused to budge until his mother mentioned her son's love of superheroes, prompting fireman Sonchai Yoosabai to take a novel approach to the problem.
"My fireman rushed back to the fire station and took out his Spider-Man costume... The boy immediately ran into his arms with a smile," sergeant Virat Boonsadao said.
He said the fireman keeps the costume at work to liven up school fire drills.
no,no, no!!! They meant the OTHER kind of stimulus!
The Liberals launched a new website today to provide their own assessment of the government's attempts to stimulate the economy.
But future visitors to the site are only a small, common typo away from getting something far... uh... less partisan, let's just say.
OnProbation.ca promises that "you can help us keep the government on track."
OnProbation.COM promises... lets put it this way, there keyword description on Google is : "OnProbation .com - Black Asian Interracial Porn Videos & Movies. "
Liberals say they weren't aware of that other site when choosing their name. (geeze, you'd think someone would have checked for availabilities and checked the sites for the names that were taken... who was sleeping on the job here??)
It remains to be seen which site will get more traffic in the coming months.... Not that i'll be going to them ;-)
Saw this on tonight's episode of Smallville, Thought i'd share it:
LOIS' RULES OF REPORTING
1 - ALWAYS know your source.
2 - Always make a good first impression (and don't screw up with the boss).
3 - Do WHATEVER it takes to get the story.
4 - If something seems to weird to be true, it usually is.
5 - Never take deadlines too seriously.
6 - Triple check your facts.
7 - Put all the good stuff at the beginning.
The Conficker worm is scheduled to activate on April 1, for those of you who are long time readers, you'll know that I have been warning you about this virus for a few months now, back on January 16 2009 with the first virus alert, then again on February 14th 2009 when Microsoft announced the reward leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for the chaotic virus.
The remaining unanswered question is: Will it prove to be the world’s biggest April Fool’s joke or is this virus as bad as some experts believe it to be?
Conficker is a program that is spread by exploiting several weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Various versions of the software have spread widely around the world since October 2008, mostly outside the United States because there are more computers overseas running unpatched, pirated Windows. (The program does not infect Macintosh or Linux-based computers.)
An estimated 12 million or more machines have been infected. However, many have also been disinfected, so a precise census is difficult to obtain.
It is possible to detect and remove Conficker using commercial antivirus tools offered by many companies. However, the most recent version of the program has a significantly improved capacity to remove commercial antivirus software and to turn off Microsoft’s security update service. It can also block communications with Web services provided by security companies to update their products. It even systematically opens holes in firewalls in an effort to improve its communication with other infected computers.
Given the sophisticated nature of the worm, the question remains: What is the purpose of Conficker, which could possibly become the world’s most powerful parallel computer on April 1? That is when the worm will generate 50,000 domain names and systematically try to communicate with each one. The authors then only need to register one of the domain names in order to take control of the millions of zombie computers that have been created.
Speculation about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool’s Day joke — to far darker notions. One likely possibility is that the program will be used in the “rent-a-rogue-computer” business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. Just like Amazon.com offers computing time on its network for rent, the Conficker team might rent access to its “network” for devious purposes like spamming.
The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the program, which security researchers are still trying to completely decode.
According to a research addendum to be added Thursday to an earlier paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, the infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. The peer-to-peer design is also highly distributed, making it extremely difficult for security teams to defeat the system by disabling so-called super-nodes.
Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible.
Or perhaps the Conficker botnet’s masters have something more Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, by the name of Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the idea of a “Dark Google.” His theory is, What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers? Malware already does this on a focused basis using a variety of schemes that are referred to as “spear phishing,” in a reference to the widespread use of social engineering tricks on the Net.
But to do something like that on such a huge scale? That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.
What's going to happen on April 1st 2009? will most of the internet come crashing down? will millions of computers be wiped out? Or is this like the so-called Millenium Bug? lots of sizzle, very little steak.. (oh great, now i'm hungry, should have had a bigger breakfast) We'll have to wait and see......
Hollywood couldn't write this script....
Thoughts? what do you think will happen a week from today?
Obama ice cream, anyone? Chocolate-vanilla ice cream is one of several Russian products being marketed using America's first black president, even as critics call the ads racist.
Other ads featuring US President Barack Obama have promoted tanning salons and tooth-whitening services.
But the creator of one Obama-themed ad -- for ice cream bars which have a chocolate-flavoured centre embedded in a layer of vanilla -- insisted Friday that it was not racist and should be seen as a joke.
The ad for Duet ice cream bars features a smiling, cartoonish black man flashing a V-for-Victory sign in front of the US Capitol, along with the Russian slogan: "Everyone's talking about it: dark, inside white!"
Some blasted the ad as insensitive after it surfaced on English-language websites this week. "This is just racist," said one visitor to the Ads of the World website, while another asked: "Is the ice cream as tasteless as the ad?"
Andrei Gubaidullin, who created the ad, told AFP that it was not racist and that Russia simply had a different attitude to race than Western countries.
"For Russia, this is not racist. It is fun and that's it," said Gubaidullin, creative director at Voskhod advertising agency, based in the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.
"We don't consider teasing ethnic groups racist. It is just seen as a joke," he said by telephone, adding that he personally liked Obama.
In another ad to play on Obama's race, a leaflet recently seen in Moscow used a photograph of the US president to promote a tanning salon.
A leaflet circulated in Moscow last fall showed a smiling Obama with the slogan "Full Dental Democracy!" to promote the MeraDent chain of dental clinics.
People of African descent are relatively few in Russia and those who do live in the country often complain of racism.
A soldier who publicly expressed regret for his part in the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy rallies in Beijing's Tiananmen Square has been detained by Chinese police, according to a human rights group.
In an open letter posted on the internet, Zhang Shijun, 40, called on Communist party Leader Hu Jintao to reconsider the condemnation of the student-led rallies the happened almost 20 years ago.
A family member said he was taken from his home early Friday, according to the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, a mainland-based group.
Zhang was reached on his mobile phone Friday afternoon, but said, "it was not convenient to talk," before hanging up.
His wife said Friday she had not seen or heard from him.
Zhang is among only a few soldiers to speak publicly about the incident that sparked international outrage.
It is believed troops stormed into the square killing hundreds, possibly thousands of protesters on orders from top party leaders.
Zhang spoke about his experiences during the crackdown and about serving jail time later for alleged political crimes in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.
The next day, he was ordered into his local police station and told to shun contact with foreign media, he said.
A flag flap was flying high in Ontario on Thursday after the opposition parties discovered the legislature has started buying its provincial flags from China.
Veteran New Democrat Peter Kormos said like many members of the legislature, he hands out Ontario flags on a regular basis to groups such as the boy scouts, girl guides and various community organizations.
Members of the legislature each have a $1,000 annual budget for Ontario lapel pins and flags, which they order through the government's procurement office, as they do with most office supplies.
Kormos was fuming after learning the procurement office had stopped buying Ontario flags from a Toronto company and outsourced them to China, a move apparently to save money.
"This is shameful. It's embarrassing. It's pathetic. It's rude," Kormos shouted. "I have no possible way of explaining how frustrating and angry it is for me to discover this."
Kormos said there is no way he will give out Ontario flags bearing a "made in China" label in his Welland riding after so many workers in the province have lost jobs.
"I would have this flag thrown in my face," he said. "It would be an insult for me to give this flag to any community group, and it would be an insult for any other MPP to deliver the same flag."
Speaker Steve Peters said the government chose a new vendor that sells flags made in Canada as well as China.
The flags used at the legislature are Canadian-made, said Peters, who agreed he would raise the issue with the legislative committee that oversees spending.
"I will, on behalf of the legislature, take this back both to the Board of Internal Economy and our senior managers to look at the procurement policies for the legislature." he said.
The Progressive Conservatives said buying Chinese-made flags is a bad move, especially when Ontario faces such dire economic circumstances.
"I think it's another example of a poorly thought-out government program," said Conservative Ted Chudleigh, whose family is famous for its apple pies.
"Of all items, to have a flag that is foreign-made - if you're a Chudleigh it's like buying a foreign apple. It's just not done."
Peters said members of the legislature don't have to use the procurement office for their flags, and both Kormos and Chudleigh vowed to buy the flags they give to constituents from an Ontario manufacturer.
The flags, measuring roughly 90 centimetres by 1.8 metres (three feet by six feet), are a variation on Canada's old Red Ensign, with the Union Jack in the upper left corner and the Ontario coat of arms in a red field. They cost $13 each when bought from the Chinese company, and about $18 when made in the province.
Kormos said the Chinese-made Ontario flags are of lower quality than the ones made by Flying Colours International of Toronto, which the legislature had used for the previous 12 years.
"New Democrats have been crying out for 'buy Ontario' policies, and this is just a perfect example of how jobs are being put at risk here in Ontario by an outright foolish policy," he said.
"It symbolizes an absolute disdain for so many Ontario workers and their families who've been thrust into despair because of their job losses."
Last week, the Liberal government came under fire after the provincially owned Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. purchased 22 foreign-made Mercedes-Benz cars to give away at casinos.
Deputy Premier George Smitherman admitted the OLG had made a "crappy" decision, especially when the government was looking to give billions of dollars in aid to Ontario's struggling automakers.
Ontario has lost more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the last few years, including tens of thousands this year.
Ten U.S. Muslim organizations threatened this week to cease working with the FBI, citing "McCarthy-era tactics" by the agency, including efforts to covertly infiltrate California mosques.
The groups claim the FBI has sent undercover agents posing as worshippers into mosques, pressured Muslims to become informants, labeled civil rights advocates as criminals and spread misinformation.
The FBI declined to comment on specific allegations but called the proposed move unproductive.
"Limiting honest dialogue, especially when complex issues are on the table, is generally not an effective advocacy strategy," spokesman John Miller said in a statement. "The FBI has continued our outreach efforts, across the board, with a number of concerned groups and where we agree -- or disagree -- most have concluded the best results are achieved through continued conversation. We believe that, too."
The group's statement, dated Tuesday, said several incidents of the FBI "targeting Muslim Americans lead us to consider suspending ongoing outreach efforts."
The statement was issued by the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, whose director, Agha Saeed, couldn't immediately comment because of a family emergency.
The FBI has sent "agents provocateur" into California mosques, according to the statement, which says an FBI agent threatened to make one mosque member's life a "living hell" if he did not become an informant.
Though the statement does not name the mosque member, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said last month it would seek an investigation into the February 21 arrest of Ahmadullah Niazi, an Afghanistan native.
"Mr. Niazi previously reported to [CAIR's Los Angeles office] and other community members that, during a raid of a friend's house, an FBI agent urged Mr. Niazi to work with the agency, saying that if he refused to cooperate his life would be made a 'living hell,' " a news release said.
Niazi, a member of the Islamic Center of Irvine, told CAIR his arrest was retaliation for his refusal, the release said.
The FBI directed questions about Niazi's arrest to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, California, which declined comment.
Niazi, 34, was indicted last month on charges of perjury, procuring naturalization unlawfully, using a passport procured by fraud and making false statements. A search warrant for Niazi's Tustin, California, home said Niazi became a naturalized citizen in 2004 and made false statements about his past aliases and international travel.
He also made false statements about contact with his brother-in-law Amin ul-Haq, the indictment said. Ul-Haq is said to be Osama bin Laden's security coordinator and has been labeled a "specially designated global terrorist" by the U.S. government, the indictment said.
An FBI agent said in open court that Niazi also had discussed terrorist plots with an undercover informant, according to media reports. Niazi has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.
CAIR's problems with the FBI began before Niazi's arrest. Last year, the FBI discontinued its "formal contact" with CAIR.
The Tuesday statement said the FBI unjustly designated CAIR and other organizations as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the Holy Land Foundation case. A jury convicted Holy Land Foundation leaders last year of conspiring to support terrorism and launder money for a terrorist group.
"Making this unjust designation public violates the Justice Department's own guidelines and wrongly implies that those listed are somehow involved in criminal activity," the statement said.
The FBI's Miller declined to comment on specifics, but said the FBI wants to avoid "formally constructed partnerships" with CAIR.
"Our concerns relate to a number of distinct narrow issues specific to CAIR and its national leadership," Miller said.
Before the FBI severed formal ties, CAIR officials had met with the FBI to discuss hate crimes targeting Muslims. On occasion, CAIR offered assistance in investigations. The group also held training sessions for FBI agents on Islamic culture and ways to improve interactions with the Muslim community.
CAIR this week called the FBI allegations a "campaign of smears and misinformation," a remnant of the Bush administration.
"It is not surprising that we would be targeted in a purely political move by those in the previous administration who sought to prevent us from defending the civil rights of American Muslims," said a statement from the group's national communications director, Ibrahim Hooper.
Tuesday's group statement also mentioned "a flourishing of anti-Muslim activity" during the previous administration and expressed fear that "counterintelligence programs are quelling lawful dissent."
Unless the FBI affords fair treatment to all mosques, Muslims and Muslim groups, the statement said, Muslims should consider suspending ties to the agency.
"This possible suspension, of course, would in no way affect our unshakable duty to report crimes or threats of violence to our nation,"
Austrian incest father Josef Fritzl suspected of four murders
Josef Fritzl is likely to spend the rest of his life locked up in a psychiatric unit - but the full extent of his crimes may be yet to surface.
The depraved father, convicted yesterday after imprisoning his daughter, Elisabeth, for 24 years, is being investigated over at least four unsolved murders and disappearances.
A jury took only hours to find the 73-year-old guilty of rape, incest, deprivation of liberty, enslavement and murder by neglect over the death of his new-born son Michael in 1996.
Impassive, he accepted the verdict and said he would not be launching an appeal, bringing a swift end to a case that has shocked the world.
His life sentence means he cannot be freed for at least 15 years. He would then have to prove he no longer posed a danger to the public before being released.
Even as he was led away to serve his sentence, police were re-examining missing person and unsolved murder cases over the past four decades.
One is the 1986 murder of Martina Posch, 17, who was raped, strangled and dumped in a lake a short distance from where Fritzl and wife Rosemarie ran a guesthouse.
"What really stands out is that Martina looks similar to Fritzl's daughter. The likeness is incredible," police chief Alois Lissl said.
Other cases include the shotgun murder of Anna Neumayer, 17, near Fritzl's workplace in 1966 and the disappearance of Julia Kuehrer, 16, near his home in 2006.
The investigation also includes sex worker Gabriele Superkova, 20, was murdered and dumped in a lake near where Fritzl was holidaying in 2007.
Meanwhile, there is ongoing disbelief that Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, knew nothing of the cellar although police insist she is an innocent party.
"What woman would stay silent if she knew her husband had seven children with his daughter and was holding her prisoner in the cellar?," police have said.
Rosemarie, like all of Elisabeth's siblings, refused to testify at Fritzl's trial.
Teenage boys, take note. If you must wear your pants low, at least make sure you are wearing underpants.
It is a lesson Trent Joseph Wroe, an Australian teenager has learned the hard way after a night out in Mooloolaba on February 28.
The 19-year-old faced Maroochydore Magistrates Court yesterday on a charge of public nuisance, after his pants fell down and exposed his bare bottom as he walked along the Esplanade just after midnight.
The case even managed to get a chuckle out of magistrate Tom Killeen, who advised Mr Wroe to wear a belt in future.
“I wore a belt today,” Mr Wroe said in court as he indicated to his shorts.
The incident occurred when a female police officer was walking past Mr Wroe when his pants fell down. She arrested him for public nuisance.
Police prosecutor Rick Pallister said it appeared Mr Wroe had exposed his buttocks in a “deliberate manner”.
Senior Constable Pallister said Mr Wroe exposed his bottom moments after he had spat in the direction of police.
Mr Wroe pleaded guilty to the charge, but said outside court it had all been a misunderstanding. He said he spat because he was sick and had not intended to aim his phlegm at the police.
As for the matter of the loose pants, he said he had simply borrowed jeans from a larger friend and they did not fit properly.
“I didn’t have any jeans and my mate’s a big bloke, so I chucked on some of his and they sat sweet,” Mr Wroe said.
“They just fell down in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Mr Wroe said he was delighted to get a laugh from Mr Killeen.
“I’m happy I had a good effect on someone; that’s always good if you can get a laugh out of a serious person,” he said.
Mr Wroe said the next time he went out, he would make sure he wore a belt and underpants.
He also made a request to the court for the name of the female police officer he had spat near, so he could issue her a formal apology.
Mr Wroe was fined $250 (Austrialian funds, about $160). He asked if the punishment could be converted to community service so he could “give something back”.
Workers at a Dallas, Texas high school staged cage fights among troubled students, making them settle their differences with bare-knuckled brawls in a steel utility cage inside a boys' locker room, school district documents show.
The principal and other employees at South Oak Cliff High "knew of the practice, allowed it to go on for a time, and failed to report it," according to a 2008 report from the Dallas school district's Office of Professional Responsibility.
The documents were obtained by The Dallas Morning News for a story in its Thursday editions.
The report describes two instances of cage fighting between 2003 and 2005.
Dallas schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa confirmed that there were "some things that happened inside of a cage" and called the fights "unacceptable."
No criminal charged have been filed in the case.
Former principal Donald Moten denied the allegations, saying he had nothing to comment on because the fights never happened.
"That's barbaric. You can't do that at a high school. You can't do that anywhere," said Moten, who resigned in 2008. "Ain't nothing to comment on. It never did happen. I never put a stop to anything because it never happened."
But a middle school counsellor who was fired from the high school and has filed a whistleblower lawsuit said Moten and members of the school's security staff encouraged the fights.
"It was gladiator-style entertainment for the staff," said former South Oak Cliff employee Frank Hammond. "They were taking these boys downstairs to fight. And it was sanctioned by the principal and security."
A district spokesman declined additional comment Thursday.
"This is a personnel matter and we're not authorized to talk about personnel," spokesman Jon Dahlander told The Associated Press.
The report said Hammond didn't see any of the fights. Hall monitor Gary King told investigators he witnessed the head of campus security and an assistant basketball coach place two students in the cage to fight.
District investigators described the cage as an equipment area in the boys' locker room separated by metal lockers and wire mesh.
In one incident, a security monitor tried to fight a student in the cage, but Moten broke up that fight. In another incident, Moten told security personnel to put two fighting students "in the cage and let 'em duke it out," according to the report.
The district's report is dated March 17, 2008, and emerged from an investigation into grade-changing allegations that eventually cost South Oak Cliff its 2006 state basketball championship.
Last month, the University Interscholastic League stripped the school of its 2005 title as well because the team used academically ineligible players.
In 2006, Moten accused Hammond of changing a student's grade, and the district placed Hammond on administrative leave. Although an appeals judge reinstated him, he was later fired.
Our mental abilities start to go at a younger age than thought, a researcher has found.
Age 22 is when the brain peaks in terms of the speed of thoughts, ability to reason and visual problem solving ability, psychology professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia reported in the April issue of the journal Neurobiology of Aging.
"Some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s," Salthouse concluded.
In the study, Salthouse looked at 2,000 healthy people aged 18 to 60 for an average of seven years.
Test scores started going downhill at age 27, he found.
But vocabulary skills and general knowledge actually improved until age 60.
Study participants solved problems, recalled words and story details and were asked to find patterns in letters and symbols tests like those used to spot signs of dementia.
In other words, that old adage about "If you don't use it you're going to lose it" applies to our brain fitness much earlier in our lives than previously thought.
So what can you do today, especially if you are beyond the ripe old age of 27, to not only prevent cognitive decline but enhance cognitive performance?
Their are four or five areas of attention which require regular effort on our part in order for our brains to stay sharp.
Alvaro Fernandez at Sharp Brains says that the four pillars of brain fitness involve good nutrition, stress management, novel learning challenges, and physical exercise.
Simon Evans, Ph.D. and Paul Burghardt, Ph.D. add in the area of sleep to the above list.
If we take care of getting our brains the nutritional ingredients they need and provide the intellectual stimulation, our brains will continue to grow new synapses and dendrites, our brains will incorporate new neurons (neurogenesis) into existing neuronal circuits, which offsets the neuronal deaths that happen every day from ordinary wear and tear, let alone tax season, and if we provide novel challenge, like learning a new language for example, a new instrument, or any new topic, our brains will very easily handle what Professor Salthouse describes in his work.
If we do not provide novel learning experiences to our brains, they will prune new neurons and synapses to utilize resources somewhere else. So learn something today.
Perhaps the most important part of keeping brains at their best is physical exercise.Home made high intensity interval training with equipment as simple as a balance ball, which gets you breathing at least deep enough to make it hard to talk or even sing while exercising, will keep your neurogenesis strong, offsetting the declines Professor Salthouse notes.
Our brains are the most energy intensive organ we have, and they do not store energy, so energy and nutrients have to constantly be supplied to neurons, and exercise gets extra blood with its nutrients to the brain, and helps brains increase the number of available blood vessels.
The body will build what we need, and pare what is not being used.
Nutrition must include eating lots of fruit and vegetables, vine ripened, hopefully locally grown, which contain anti-oxidants, phytochemicals, fiber, minerals, and vitamins. Try blue berries.
If you need supplements, a good multi-vitamin and definitely omega 3's are mandatory to keep neurons healthy, and connecting away.
Lots of important consolidation and hormonal activity happens in our brains when we are sleeping, and if you shorten your sleep unnecessarily, then those consolidations are not completed and brain deficits happen. So get your sleep.
Last but not least, there are a number of brain fitness programs available which stimulate neurons in novel ways.
Take advantage of them to help keep your brain going full tilt until it is way older than 27. Some of the research on those programs is nothing short of miraculous!.
Use them sitting at your computer before and after your work out, your nap, and your big salad full of colorful vegetables, and then send a note to Professor Salthouse about your progress.
Natasha Richardson, a gifted and precocious heiress to acting royalty whose career highlights included the film "Patty Hearst" and a Tony-winning performance in a stage revival of "Cabaret," died Wednesday at age 45 after suffering a head injury from a skiing accident in Quebec.
Alan Nierob, the Los Angeles-based publicist for Richardson's husband Liam Neeson, confirmed her death in a written statement.
"Liam Neeson, his sons (Micheal and Daniel) and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha," the statement said.
"They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."
Neeson was reported in Toronto at the time of Richardson's accident, filming the movie "Chloe" with Julianne Moore.
Producers confirmed that Neeson immediately left the Toronto set upon news of his wife's accident.
The statement did not give details on the cause of death for Richardson, who suffered a head injury when she fell on a beginner's trail during a private ski lesson at the luxury Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec. She was taken to hospital Tuesday in Montreal and later flown to a hospital in New York.
Family members had been seen coming and going from the New York hospital where Richardson was taken.
Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson's mother, arrived in a car with darkened windows and was taken through a garage when she arrived at the Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side about 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. An hour earlier, Richardson's sister, Joely, arrived alone and was swarmed by the media as she entered through the back of the hospital.
It was a sudden and horrifying loss for her family and friends, for the film and theatre communities, for her many fans and for both her native and adoptive countries. Descended from at least three generations of actors, Richardson was a proper Londoner who came to love New York, an elegant blonde with large, lively eyes, a bright smile and a hearty laugh.
If she never quite attained the acting heights of her Academy Award-winning mother, she still had enjoyed a long and worthy career. As an actress, Richardson was equally adept at passion and restraint, able to portray besieged women both confessional (Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois) and confined (the concubine in the futuristic horror of "The Handmaid's Tale").
Like other family members, she divided her time between stage and screen. On Broadway, she won a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in a 1998 revival of "Cabaret." She also appeared in New York in a production of Patrick Marber's "Closer" (1999) as well as 2005 revival of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," in which she played Blanche opposite John C. Reilly's Stanley Kowalski.
She met Liam Neeson when they made their Broadway debuts in 1993, co-starring in "Anna Christie," Eugene O'Neill's drama about a former prostitute and the sailor who falls in love with her.
"The astonishing Natasha Richardson...gives what may prove to be the performance of the season as Anna, turning a heroine who has long been portrayed (and reviled) as a whore with a heart of gold into a tough, ruthlessly unsentimental apostle of O'Neill's tragic understanding of life," New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote.
"Miss Richardson, seeming more like a youthful incarnation of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, than she has before, is riveting from her first entrance through a saloon doorway's ethereal shaft of golden light."
Her most notable film roles came earlier in her career. Richardson played the title character in Paul Schrader's "Patty Hearst," a 1988 biopic about the kidnapped heiress for which the actress became so immersed that even between scenes she wore a blindfold, the better to identify with her real-life counterpart.
"Natasha Richardson...has been handed a big unwritten role; she feels her way into it, and she fills it," wrote the New Yorker's Pauline Kael.
"We feel how alone and paralyzed Patty is - she retreats into being a hidden observer."
Richardson was directed again by Schrader in a 1990 adaptation of Ian McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers" and, also in 1990, starred in the screen version of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."
She later co-starred with Neeson in "Nell," with Mia Farrow in "Widow's Peak" and with a pre-teen Lindsay Lohan in a remake of "The Parent Trap." More recent movies, none of them widely seen, included "Wild Child," "Evening" and "Asylum."
She was born in London in 1963, the performing gene inherited not just from her parents (Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson) but from her maternal grandparents (Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson), an aunt (Lynn Redgrave) and an uncle (Corin Redgrave). Her younger sister, Joely Richardson, also joined the family business.
Friends and family members remembered Natasha as an unusually poised child, perhaps forced to grow up early when her father left her mother in the late '60s for Jeanne Moreau. (Tony Richardson died in 1991).
Interviewed in 2001, Natasha Richardson said she related well to her family if only because, "we've all been through it in one way or another and so we've had to be strong."
"Also, we embrace life. We are not cynical about life."
Richardson always planned to act, apart from one brief childhood moment when she wanted to be a flight attendant - "wonderful irony now since I hate to fly and have to take a pill in order to get on a plane. I'm so terrified."
Her screen debut came at age four when she appeared as a flower girl in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," directed by her father, whose movies included "Tom Jones" and "The Entertainer." The show business wand had already tapped her the year before, when she saw her mother in the 1967 film version of the Broadway show "Camelot."
"She was so beautiful. I still look at that movie and I can't believe it. It still makes me cry, the beauty of it. I could go on and on - in that white fur hooded thing, when she comes through the forest for the first time. You've never seen anything so beautiful!" Richardson said.
She studied at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and was an experienced stage actress by her early 20s, appearing in "On the Razzle," "Charley's Aunt" and "The Seagull," for which the London Drama Critics awarded her most promising newcomer.
Although she never shared her mother's fiercely expressed political views, they were close professionally and acted together, most recently on Broadway to play the roles of mother and daughter in a one-night benefit concert version of "A Little Night Music," the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler musical.
Before meeting up with Neeson (who called her "Tash") Richardson was married to theatre producer Robert Fox, whose credits include the 1985 staging of "The Seagull" in which his future wife appeared.
She sometimes remarked on the differences between her and her second husband - she from a theatrical dynasty and he from a working-class background in Northern Ireland.
"He's more laid back, happy to see what happens, whereas I'm a doer and I plan ahead," Richardson told the Independent on Sunday newspaper in 2003.
"The differences sometimes get in the way but they can be the very things that feed a marriage, too."
She once said Neeson's serious injury in a 2000 motorcycle accident - he suffered a crushed pelvis after colliding with a deer in upstate New York - had made her really appreciate life.
"I wake up every morning feeling lucky - which is driven by fear, no doubt, since I know it could all go away," she told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2003.
A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident has made himself a prosthetic replacement with a USB drive attached.
Jerry Jalava uses the 2GB memory stick, accessed by peeling back the "nail", to store photos, movies and programmes.The finger is not permanently attached to his hand, so it can be easily left plugged into a computer when in use.Mr Jalava says he is already thinking about upgrading the finger to include more storage and wireless technology."I'm planning to use another prosthetic as a shell for the next version, which will have removable fingertip and RFID tag," he wrote on his blog, ProtoBlogr.net.Half of Mr Jalava's left ring finger had to be amputated last summer after he crashed into a deer while riding his motorbike near Helsinki.He says he was inspired to create the unique storage device when doctors treating him joked that he should have a USB "finger drive" after finding out that he was a software developer.
Don’t expect Toronto mayor David Miller to hand ballplayer Chipper Jones the key to the city any time soon.
The Atlanta Braves third baseman wasn’t exactly selling the city as a tourist destination this week while attending the World Baseball Classic as a member of Team USA.
“Just way too many days off,” he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We stayed in Toronto for a week and played three games. I don’t know if you ever stayed in Toronto, but it’s not exactly Las Vegas. To say that we were plucking our eyebrows out one at a time would be an understatement.”
Jones, who has never managed to play a full 162-game schedule in any of his 14 major league seasons, strained an oblique muscle during the tournament and has since left the American club to join the Braves at spring training for treatment.
The sour grapes didn’t stop with Toronto.
Jones told the newspaper there’s far too many days off between games, and if the format doesn’t change, he won’t play again.
“There’s some serious problems with the WBC setup,” said Jones, who will skip the rest of the tournament. “I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. But I wouldn’t do it again under the current format. There’s way too many days off. This tournament could be over by now.”
The 2008 National League batting champ went 0-for-10 with six strikeouts in three games for Team USA.
Complaining about having too many days off? not having anything to do?? If you can't find something to do in Toronto, there is something wrong with you.
Have you heard of The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Royal Ontario Museum, Casa Loma (I love that place) the CN Tower, The entire entertainment district, All of our restaraunts (foods from all over the world can be found here) I could keep going and going.... Nothing to do in Toronto? What are you talking about???
Is Best Buy refusing to honor its own price-matching policy?
Technology Web site HDGuru.com has published a report describing three separate visits to Best Buy locations where salespeople refused to comply with the store's own price-matching policy.
The report goes on to provide advice to customers interested in obtaining a price match themselves. Here's the gist of the HDGuru's exchange:
When asked to match the price, salesmen at all three stores said, " no," giving the same excuse: "The advertised Panasonic was on sale for three days, and Best Buy's price-match policy exempts limited-time sales."
However, there is no "limited time" exemption in Best Buy's price-match policy. Store personnel simply made up a phony excuse or were instructed to do so by higher-ups.
The report also cites an unnamed Best Buy source who claims that the order to refuse price matches, despite going against the company's stated policy, descended from management, with the aim of increasing the chain's profit margins.
HDGuru's advice to shoppers ranges from common sense (don't make a scene) to being mildly deceptive (ask if the store offers extended warranties, even if you don't want one).
I'm not advocating or endorsing said advice, but if you're serious about getting a price match or have been refused, it might come in handy.
A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic and known as "Predator X" had a bite that would make T-Rex look feeble, scientists said on Monday.
The 50 ft (15 meter) long Jurassic era marine reptile had a crushing 33,000 lbs (15 metric tons) per square inch bite force, the Natural History Museum of Oslo University said of the new find on the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
"With a skull that's more than 10 feet long you'd expect the bite to be powerful but this is off the scale," said Joern Hurum, an associate professor of vertebrate paleontology at the museum who led the international excavation in 2008.
"It's much more powerful than T-Rex," he said of the pliosaur reptile that would have been a top marine predator. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a top land carnivore among dinosaurs.
The scientists reconstructed the predator's head and estimated the force by comparing it with the similarly-shaped jaws of alligators in a park in Florida.
"The calculation is one of the largest bite forces ever calculated for any creature," the Museum said of the bite, estimated with the help of evolutionary biologist Greg Erickson from Florida State University.
Predator X's bite was more than 10 times more powerful than any modern animal and four times the bite of a T-Rex, it said of the fossil, thought to be 147 million years old. Alligators, crocodiles and sharks all now have fearsome bites.
The teeth of the pliosaur, belonging to a new species, were a foot (30 cms) long. The scientists reconstructed the reptile from a partial skull and 20,000 fragments of skeleton.
The pliosaur, estimated to have weighed 45 metric tons, was similar to but had more massive bones than another fossil sea monster found on Svalbard in 2007, also estimated at 50 feet long and the largest pliosaur to date.
"It's not complete enough to say it's really bigger than 15 meters," Hurum said of the new fossil.
Hurum had said of the first fossil plesiosaur that it was big enough to chomp on a small car. He said the bite estimates for the latest fossil forced a rethink.
"This one is more like it could crush a Hummer," he said. referring to General Motors' large sport utility vehicle.
Among other findings were that the pliosaur had a small thin brain shaped like that of a great white shark, according to scans by Patrick Druckenmiller of the University of Alaska.
Pliosaurs preyed upon squid-like animals, fish, and other marine reptiles. Predator X had four huge flippers to propel itself along, perhaps using just two at cruising speeds and the others for a burst of speed.
Once Martin Brodeur breaks the All-Time records for Wins and Shutouts for a goale, they will NEVER be broken.
The same was said about Patrick Roy and Terry Sawchuk, but we really mean it this time!
I don't have a time machine, Not even a crystal ball, but I'm going to throw this out there nonetheless: When New Jersey's Martin Brodeur breaks the records for most regular season career wins (which he did on 3/17/2009 vs. the visiting Chicago Blackhawks) and most career shutouts, he will make those marks untouchable.
Of course, there is an irony to this - at one time people thought Terry Sawchuk's mark of 103 career shutouts was itself too many to surpass. But Brodeur is cresting at the right time for the right team and the fact he has a couple more seasons in him will push those all-time numbers into a bleak stratosphere for all those who attempt to catch him.
With the exception of this season's freak arm injury, Brodeur is good for at least 70 starts per campaign, while playing on a Devils team that is always a playoff threat (hence, many wins). Even at 37 years of age (which he will turn in May 2009), pencil in Marty for one more stellar season (roughly 40 wins), then potentially a falling-off that will net him another 20 victories (still not bad), if we're going to be conservative. Heck, it's Marty - maybe he has two more great seasons after this one.
When all is said and done, Brodeur will retire from the NHL with, say, 615 career regular season wins and let's give him 112 shutouts on top of that. Now, Marty certainly has some exceptional peers in the NHL today, but time and math are working against them.
A cursory search of statistics will tell you the goaltenders with the best opportunity to usurp Brodeur on either record are Vancouver's Roberto Luongo and Henrik Lundqvist of the New York Rangers. Age and workload (often earlier in their careers) eliminate other elites such as Miikka Kiprusoff, Marty Turco or Evgeni Nabokov. As for younger goalies such as Steve Mason or somewhat tarnished golden boy Carey Price, a legacy of long-term success naturally must come first.
At 29 years old, Luongo currently sits at 222 career wins and 43 shutouts. He has played eight full seasons in the NHL and probably has 10 more in him barring unforeseen circumstance. Forecast 35 wins per season in that decade and his total comes to 580 (I assume he'll win a couple more this year), a fantastic total, but likely short of Brodeur in the end. Roberto Luongo is also on pace to break Sawchuk's shutout record, but alas; by the time he gets there, it will be Brodeur's, and the number will be higher.
Lundqvist, Who's even younger than Luongo, could play at least a dozen more NHL seasons, but would have to be remarkably consistent on a team that is anything but. Nevertheless, if you have faith in Hank, give him 35 wins per campaign. Tack those on to his 135 victories to date and Lundqvist tops out at approximately 550. The big problem with Hank is the scattershot history he has with shutouts. On last year's solidly defensive Rangers team, he had 10. This year, thanks to Wade Redden, Dmitri Kalinin (since traded) and all, he has just two.
Average those out to six per year and Lundqvist still doesn't even come close.
The biggest advantage that Brodeur has is the fact he's already accomplished the bulk of his numbers. He doesn't have to worry about his team rebuilding at some point in his career; he doesn't have to worry about lockouts or wonky groins; he's made it already.
So while the goaltenders of today are fabulous, Marty Brodeur will outlast them all.
IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes.
Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it's a very important goal to articulate in public.
Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. Oddly, though his talk was part of the film festival, the room was packed almost entirely by attendees of the associated SXSW Interactive Festival.
Apparently, Needham was talking about the history of IMDb -- from its founding even before the advent of the World Wide Web, to its launch as a dot-com site to its being bought by Amazon.com.
But late in the talk, he explained how he wants to make it possible for the 57 million monthly unique visitors to the site to watch, with the click of one button, all the movies, TV shows, and other video content indexed on the site.
It will be difficult to fulfill the vision, Needham said, "because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming."
But these days, free or paid streaming of movies is available from a number of sources, including: Netflix, Hulu, TV.com (a part of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News), Amazon, iTunes, and others. Each of those sources, though, has its own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a massive undertaking.
Still, rather than being a throw-away line that didn't carry any weight, Needham reiterated at the end of the lecture, that the vision was one of the company's major goals for 2009 and beyond.
Already, IMDb has begun adding streaming content to the site, a program that began in September 2008. Right now, Needham said, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes and a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, many of which are movie trailers, interviews, and featurettes.
He said that the site is adding thousands of new pieces of video content per week.
At that rate, however, it's sure to take the site quite some time to achieve the goal. Needham said he imagined a time frame of three years from now when we will all look back at early 2009, when so many media sites are trying to solve the problem of making content available to those who want it in the face of resistance from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, and we'll shake our heads at where we were at.
"We'll laugh at how little we knew about what business models would work," Needham said.
As the Star Trek quote goes (I'm not a Star Trek fan, so I don't really know what character was the first to use the quote, so I'm not going to attribute it to any one) :
"Resistance is futile"
Back in the 1870s, the town of Deadwood, South Dakota experienced a gold rush and quickly became home to gunfighters, gamblers, cussing and plenty of women woman "of poor reputation". Today, Deadwood is just a tourist trap in boring old South Dakota (No offence to anyone FROM South Dakota, but come on, even you'd have to agree!).
In many ways, that's exactly what's happened to the social-networking website Facebook.
Facebook's formative years (2003-2006) started out much like the Wild West had. Open, kind of barren, but people were free to do as they pleased without much worry of repercussions.
With ridiculous status updates, embarrassing photos, nasty late-night wall postings on an ex's wall following a "user is now single" update. With the creation of the news feed in September 2006, which allows a user to see what other users are doing, it was like picking up a newspaper in the morning and every article was a gossip story about someone you knew.
It was awesome!
But slowly, Facebook has evolved into something else. Something that managed to take up much more of my time, yet bores me in a way it never did before.
Here's how it happened....
Phase 1: Fear your neighbours! Then improvise!
When the media first discovered Facebook (scholars suggest this was sometime in late 2006 after it got a mention on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"), there was one nearly homogenous response in reporting - "lock your doors, hide your face, evildoers want your information!"
After being scared about their privacy, users started clamping down on the way they allowed their information to be seen. The news feed has slowly been reduced to a shadow of its former self, with many users choosing to severely limit the feature.
At the same time, the website skyrocketed in popularity to the point where both your mom and your boss (and even your bosses mom) were on it. Suddenly, those pictures of you being held by the ankles while you're performing a keg stand didn't seem like such a smart thing to post.
Worst of all, were all the reported cases of employers scouting out Facebook for dirt on potential employees. While Facebook profiles are always an idealized version of a person, soon people began setting their profiles to look like a bland virtual-resume...just in case.
This is not to say there's not some fun, risqué stuff on Facebook. There is. But with the tent growing larger and larger, it's no surprise that people have become more tentative and conservative with what they post and how they act.
Phase 2: Every day is exactly the same
Every Facebook user over 25 knows (but won't necessarily admit to it) that the best part of Facebook is "catching up" with someone you haven't seen in years.
Seeing their profile for the first time, with its orgy of photos (are they still hot? what?? they're hotter??), information on marital status, jobs and children (oh damn, i'm too late, she's married and has children) -- well, that's as good as Facebook gets.
Eventually though, you are going to run out of people that you will want to glean your years apart with a check of their profile.
But after that initial "catch-up", you are left with the day-to-day boring minutiae. A sample:
- Tom is going to the shower, then bed.
- Amy is tanning.
- Sarah is loving her new red kitchenaid mixer!
- Jenna is without power and cable at home.
I already have my own perfectly mundane life to deal with, I don't need to know yours.
Dr. Robin Dunbar, an Oxford University anthropologist has said that the brain's cognitive power limits the size of a person's (real-life) social network to about 150 people. That sounds reasonable.
Yet, There are people with over 500 Facebook friends (at last count). I've also seen others that have nearly 1,000 "friends". This is data Malcolm Gladwell should write a book about.
A lot of people on Facebook have massive networks, but must be inundated with so much data it's utterly pointless for them. They might as well be logged into someone else's account because there's no way they are interested in the majority of people on their account, Do they even remember when they added most of those people, or when that person added them? or who the heck most of those people even are?
You just can't care about your massive amount of Facebook friends, your brain won't do it.
Phase 3: Useful to the point it's work
It was reported that social networking has surpassed email in terms of worldwide popularity, with Facebook being the most popular of the social networking sites.
This is not surprising, as Facebook has an email system that simplifies getting in touch with people, as well as a built-in instant messenger.
Facebook has also become the go-to planning calendar for social groups of a certain age, with its Event interface making it easier than ever to plan a social gathering.
Add in socially-conscious groups to join, bands and TV shows I "need" to become a "fan" to promote, too many applications to count (I'm especially looking at you Scrabble!), birthday wishes to give and a quick log-in to Facebook can feel like the start of a marathon.
You know when you put off logging in to Facebook, the same way you put off taking out the trash, that's not a good sign for something that's supposed to be entertainment.
Somewhere along the line, Facebook stopped being a place to "creep" your ex-girlfriend's profile and became a semi-useful technology you can't live without.
The wild Deadwood of U.S. history eventually became Deadwood, the town that's a National Historic Landmark. Prettier, more useful and a lot less crazy - truly, the inverse of the mores of its founding.
That's the same fate awaiting Facebook. A place where people will stop by to say, "I remember that...It used to be fun here."
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