News Funk

A ten-year-old girl who died locked in a small box in the boiling heat as punishment for taking a popsicle from the fridge suffered horrific abuse at the hands of her family for months, it has emerged.

Ame Deal had been shut in the plastic container many times before by her supposed guardians, who would throw the box around with her inside, records show.

She was made to walk barefoot outside in the searing heat, had to eat dog faeces and was often was forced to sleep in the shower as punishment for wetting the bed.   Read More…

We all knew that once Apple starting enforcing new rules for in-app purchases, it would change how media companies do business on the iPhone and iPad.

Now, we’re beginning to see just what that looks like for companies trying to avoid giving a 30% cut to Cupertino. Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble all removed the stores from their iOS applications on Monday, as well as any hyperlinks to or mentions of their online stores.

Google Books — recently announced distribution and retail partner for the new multiplatform Harry Potter e-books — is simply gone from the App Store, without explanation from either Apple or Google, although possibly a revised app may be forthcoming.   Read More…

A 14-year-old born in the United States has been found guilty in a Mexican court of torturing and beheading at least four people and kidnapping three others.

The teenage hit man was sentenced to three years in a correctional facility, the maximum allowed under Mexican law. He also has to pay a 4.5 million Mexican peso fine ($387,500 U.S.).

The defendant, known as “El Ponchis” (“The Cloak”) is a 14-year-old boy from San Diego. Because he is a minor, his trial in Cuernavaca, Mexico, was closed to the public.

He was captured near Mexico City in December. In an on-camera interrogation by Mexican military authorities, the youth admitted to brutally killing people – the victims all were beheaded. The video shows a military interrogator asking the slim teenager with curly hair several questions.   Read More…

The wealth gap in the United States has grown wider in the wake of the Great Recession, with black and Hispanic American households faring much worse than white households, according to a study published Tuesday.

The study, from 2009 data compiled by the Pew Research Center, found the median wealth of white households was 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.   Read More…

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — A U.S. military task force has discovered that part of a $2.16 billion transportation contract was diverted through a murky network of subcontractors and into the hands of a group of Afghan power-brokers, criminals and Taliban insurgents, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation.

Roughly $600 million of the contract had been spent before authorities were alerted to the scandal, the source said, citing an internal report.

Only part of that money, however, is believed to have been diverted to “nefarious elements,” the source added.   Read More…

Heat waves aside, this last weekend has proven to be a fairly rough one for e-book sellers. In spite of backing off a bit from its initial demands, there have apparently been some major changes afoot in the iOS App Store, with a number of apps scaling back access to their online e-book markets or being pulled from the store altogether. Kobo, one of the former, told The Wall Street Journal (which also reported on its own iOS woes) it was informed on Saturday that it needs to stop selling books through its app. The Google Books app, meanwhile, has been removed altogether, though Google has yet to comment on the matter, possibly revamping the app to comply with the stricter rules. While the adjustments will certainly be a nuisance for the companies involved, selling books through Apple devices will not be an impossibility, so long as customers can still access the markets through Safari.   Read More…

Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn’t approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, “Your walnut products are drugs” — and “new drugs” at that — and, therefore, “they may not legally be marketed … in the United States without an approved new drug application.” The agency even threatened Diamond with “seizure” if it failed to comply. Diamond’s transgression was to make “financial investments to educate the public and supply them with walnuts,” as William Faloon of Life Extension magazine put it.    Read More…

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin’ Bush.

Ironically, it won’t be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.   Read More…

Mexico City – Authorities in Ciudad Juarez arrested more than 1,000 people over the weekend in an operation aimed at cracking down on human trafficking, police said.

Federal police said raids in two dozen bars, hotels and boarding houses netted arrests of 500 men and 530 women they suspect are connected with human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

In addition, 20 female minors were rescued, police said.

At least 300 federal police officers were involved in the nine-hour sweep, which began Friday night and ended early Saturday morning, the Chihuahua state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement.

Authorities said the operation was part of Mexico’s AMBER Alert program, created to help find missing children.   Read More…

A group of seven teenagers who’d been learning survival skills in the Alaska wilderness were attacked Saturday night by a brown bear sow with cub.

The teenagers had been in the backcountry for some time, training with the National Outdoor Leadership School, which has a sizable staff focused on outdoors education and training in Palmer, the county seat of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough in Southcentral Alaska.

Two of the teenagers were badly mauled by the bear and suffered “serious, life threatening injuries,” according to a press release from Megan Peters, a spokesperson for the Alaska State Troopers and Department of Public Safety. Two others were seriously injured but sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The three others all suffered “minor injuries or had exposure-related issues,” Peters said.   Read More…

By January 2012, the State Department will do something it’s never done before: command a mercenary army the size of a heavy combat brigade. That’s the plan to provide security for its diplomats in Iraq once the U.S. military withdraws. And no one outside State knows anything more, as the department has gone to war with its independent government watchdog to keep its plan a secret.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), is essentially in the dark about one of the most complex and dangerous endeavors the State Department has ever undertaken, one with huge implications for the future of the United States in Iraq. “Our audit of the program is making no progress,” Bowen tells Danger Room.   Read More…

A Florida teen bludgeoned his parents to death with a hammer, stashed their bodies in a bedroom, then hosted dozens of people for a house party, police said Monday.

Tyler Hadley, 17, is in police custody, booked just before 5 p.m. Monday on two counts of second-degree murder with a weapon, according to the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s website. Port St. Lucie Police spokesman Tom Nichols told reporters earlier that the teenage boy, who will be tried as an adult, was denied bond.   Read More…

A Bangladeshi professor’s husband allegedly gouged her eyes out when he suspected her of cheating. Asra Nomani on how the Muslim community rose to her defense in a game of ‘shame jujitsu.’

The daughter of a retired Bangladeshi Army officer, Rumana Monzur, 33, was the image of a beautiful intellectual: wide eyes, angelic smile, and gentle disposition. While most of her aunts and uncles settled in the U.S. and Europe, landing in towns as far-flung as Bridgewater, N.J., she grew up in Bangladesh, marrying a childhood sweetheart in a “love marriage.” She became an assistant professor at Dhaka University in the country’s capital, and a year ago set out to earn a master’s degree in political science as a Fulbright scholar at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.    Read More…

Moscow

A measure signed into law today by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will define beer as an alcoholic beverage for the first time in Russia, and finally put limits on where and when the brew can be sold.

Russian public health advocates and family groups have long complained about lax legislation that classified beer as a foodstuff. That enabled it to be sold like a soft drink, even from street kiosks, and consumed openly in any public place.

Even tourists visiting Russia often remark on the ubiquitous sight of people, including teenagers, swigging on bottles of beer while walking down the street, sitting in the bus or riding the metro.   Read More…

Ok I hate windows but have high praise for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for there contributions to help the world.   But Toilets?

The toilet is broken — and not because it won’t flush.

This unsightly piece of technology, which everyone uses but no one seems to think much about, is in desperate need of an overhaul, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched a challenge to “reinvent the toilet.”

The foundation announced $41.5 million worth of grants on Tuesday aimed at getting someone to reengineer the flushing porcelain pot, which has been in use since the 1700s.

“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet,” Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s global development program, said in a statement. “But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches. New ideas. In short, we need to reinvent the toilet.”   Read More…