News – Page 7 – jimcofer.com

December 20, 2009

R.I.P. Brittany Murphy

One of my all-time favorite hotties, actress Brittany Murphy, has passed away. She was 32. From reports:

Los Angeles police have opened an investigation into circumstances surrounding the death of actress Brittany Murphy.

Police have been dispatched to Cedars-Sinai and to Murphy’s home in the tree-lined hills of West Hollywood. Police sources emphasized that their inquiry was preliminary, adding they could not say whether it would point to any criminal conduct.

Murphy, 32, died early today after going into cardiac arrest, law enforcement sources said. L.A. city firefighters responded to “a medical request” at Murphy’s home in the 1800 block of Rising Glen Road. Murphy was transported to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.

Born in Atlanta, Murphy moved to Burbank with her mother at age 13. Her film break came in the movie “Clueless” (1995), in which she starred opposite Alicia Silverstone.

You will be missed, Brittany!

via L.A. police investigate death of Brittany Murphy | Los Angeles Times.

December 17, 2009

Like any other red-blooded Steelers fan, I hate the Cincinnati Bengals. However, I’ll take a pause from that hate to mourn with the team for wide receiver Chris Henry, who died this morning after a bizarre accident here in Charlotte.

It seems that Henry got into an argument with his fiancee, and the woman tried to leave in a pickup truck. Henry then jumped into the bed of the truck as she sped away, only to fall out a short while later, suffering severe injuries. According to a spokesperson for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, Henry died at 6:36 a.m. Thursday morning. He was 26.

Henry was one of the most troubled players in the NFL, with a history of off-field troubles that reaches back to his college days at West Virginia, where he was ejected from one game and suspended for another by coach Rich Rodriguez, who called him an “embarrassment” to the team. In 2005, Henry was arrested for marijuana possession early in the season and a gun charge after the Bengals lost to the Steelers in the playoffs. In 2007, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Henry for half a season for violating the league’s conduct policy. After his fifth arrest in that same year, he was released by the Bengals, only to be given a second change with the team in 2008.

Henry had decent seasons in 2008 and 2009, but broke his forearm in a game against the Baltimore Ravens on November 8th.

He was in town visiting his fiancee’s parents, who live in the Queen City.

December 8, 2009

Tuesday’s News Roundup

– It’s funny that record companies should have such a strict stance on their customers respecting copyrights… while they themselves seem to flaunt it at will. Ars Technica is reporting about a lawsuit in Canada where Canadian record companies are being sued by their own artists for up to $60 billion! It seems that there was a change to Canadian copyright law in the 1980s which allowed record companies to use tracks from artists pending approval of the license. So if a record company wanted to release a “Best of the 80s” compilation, it no longer had to have a license in hand to use A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran” – it only had to have a application “pending”. But it seems that the record companies never bothered or even intended to follow-up on those applications, and have since released thousands of compilation albums without having the proper licenses. And the best part: the labels don’t even deny that they did this! I think it’s only fair that if Jammie Thomas was forced to pay $80,000 per song in her non-commercial piracy case that the record labels should be forced to pay the same, since they were actually making money off the deal (and yes, I know – Capitol v. Thomas was an American case, and this case is in Canada).

– Speaking of music, every year the BBC makes a list of up and coming artists they think might make it big in the upcoming calendar year (you might remember that I discovered La Roux via the 2009 list). Well, the 2010 list is out, so go and have a listen and stay ahead of the “coolness curve”!

– One last thing about music: if you’re an aspiring pop star and you’re going to be on live television, you might want to sing into the right end of the microphone.

– Smoking, estrogen and family history all contribute to breast cancer… but if studies from the University of Chicago are correct, loneliness might actually triple a woman’s chance to getting breast cancer. Studies so far have only been carried out on animals, but scientists are fairly certain that it would apply to humans as well. And given the jaw-dropping results – lonely rats had 84 times the amount of cancerous tissue their non-lonely but genetically similar counterparts did – you have to wonder.

– Brian Bonsall, who played little Andy Keaton on Family Ties, has been arrested. Again.

– Hines Ward is the NFL’s dirtiest player? Not with Flozell Adams around:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7qye-KxaFc&feature=player_embedded#

December 1, 2009

Where’s Climategate?

On November 20, 2009, hackers accessed several computers at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. They managed to make off with around 60MB of internal emails and documents, and the picture they paint is damning. Researchers at CRU allegedly: a) heavily massaged data to reach their conclusions; b) ignored data that led to a contrary conclusion; c) willfully deleted emails (evidence) of their wrongdoing; and d) sought to replace or bypass editors of scientific journals that questioned their methodology and\or results.

The fallout at supposedly neutral sites like Ars Technica has been a giant shrug, with most posters saying that yes, perhaps the scientists did behave badly, but that the underlying science is sound. I simply have to ask: is it? When you see emails like these, one has to wonder:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Or this:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

A month and a half before the hack, the BBC published this article, which calls into question the very idea of Global Warming. In it, the author asserts that the warmest year on record was 1998, and that global temperatures have either held study or actually decreased in the past 11 years, and that the rise of global temperatures in the decades before are based on a completely normal process known as Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Continue reading “Where’s Climategate?”

November 30, 2009

Cop Tases 10-Year-Old Girl

From The Smoking Gun:

An Arkansas cop tasered an unruly 10-year-old girl after her mother called police to report that the child was crying, screaming, and refusing to go to bed. The tased girl, Kiara Medlock, is about 65 pounds and 4′ 6″, according to her father.

Here’s the girl:

1118091inside3

Yes, this girl was obviously a threat to a fully-grown male police officer. This makes me sick to my stomach.

And some people wonder why other people hate cops so much.

via Cop Tases 10-Year-Old Girl – November 18, 2009.

November 23, 2009

Monday’s Strange News

So I saved several news stories for you folks today, and they all have a similar theme… they’re all a bit weird:

– Rom Houben is a Belgian man who was in a horrific car crash in 1983. At the time, doctors guessed that he was in a coma. So they treated him like that for 23 years… only to give him a brain scan in 2006 and find out that his brain was functioning perfectly. It seems that Rom wasn’t in a coma after all – he was just paralyzed from the accident. Poor Rom sat there, in his hospital bed, for 23 years without the ability to tell his doctors that he wasn’t in a coma. After the 2006 brain scan, doctors began an intensive physical rehabilitation plan, and now Rom is able to type communicate with the outside world by typing messages on a computer. Personally, I can’t think of anything scarier – lying in a hospital bed for two decades, fully conscious of everything going on around you, yet unable to communicate that to anyone else. Read more about it here.

– Police in Peru have busted criminal gang that was allegedly killing people for their fat, which they sold to European cosmetic companies. As the article points out, there is plenty of human fat available for purchase thanks to liposuction, and there’s really no documented cosmetic benefit to human fat. But still, the gang was able to sell the illicit wares for around $15,000 per litre.

– The town of Coshocton, Ohio has a free municipal Wi-Fi system. Police use it to file paperwork without leaving their cars (after giving someone a traffic ticket, for example). During festivals, vendors use it to make credit card transactions. Truckers and businessmen often stop in the town and use it to check their email or corporate websites. But it almost all came crashing down after someone used the network to illegally download a movie. Amazingly, the system only uses a single external IP address, and the MPAA had the entire network shut down because of the file-sharing. The network is now back up, but the incident only highlights the MPAA’s foolishness.

– And lastly, a story a bit closer to home: Belmont police offer Jerry Anderson kept the city’s K-9 dog in a kennel behind his home… that is, until this past Friday, when the dog was stolen. The missing Belgian Malinois is valued at $2,600.

November 20, 2009

“…almost medieval barbarity”

This is just chilling:

A thug high on drink and drugs gouged out his former lover’s eye during a murder bid and threw it from an eighth-floor balcony.

Francis Murphy was today jailed for 12 years by a judge who told him he had committed a crime of “almost medieval barbarity”.

An earlier trial heard how jealous Murphy attacked Natalie Farrell, 27, with the wire of a coat hanger as he threatened: “I am taking your eye out you f****** cow”.

After flinging her eye from the eighth floor of a Dundee high-rise, evil Murphy then tried to throw her over the balcony as well.

via Mail Online.

November 16, 2009

Is that you, Sweeney Todd?

From our Russian friends:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.

Suspicions were raised when dismembered parts of a human body were found near a bus stop in the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm, 1,150 km (720 miles) east of Moscow.

Three homeless men with previous criminal records have been arrested on suspicion of setting upon a foe with knives and a hammer before chopping up his corpse to eat, local investigators said in a statement on their www.susk.perm.ru Web site.

“After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies,” the Prosecutor-General’s main investigative unit for the Perm region said in a statement issued Friday.

It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse had been sold to customers.

Nice.

At least they didn’t make bears play ice hockey.

Russians are weird.

September 30, 2009

Oh My!

I’ve been a fan of Stephen Fry – the British writer, comedian, actor, author, television host and film director – for years now. And as long as I’ve been a fan, Fry’s been… well, portly.

No more! Fry, who once topped the scales at 21 stone (294 lbs), has lost some 6 stone (84 lbs) in the past few months. The only problem is, he looks like death:

Stephen Fry

Thankfully, he’s not sick or anything. He claims to have had a change of heart whilst filming a BBC documentary about endangered species, which required him to take long hikes and other such physical endeavors.

R.I.P. Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug, perhaps the most important person you’ve never heard of, has died of cancer. He was 95.

Scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, who developed a type of wheat that saved one billion people from starvation, has died.

Borlaug, 95, died on Saturday from complications of cancer at his Dallas home.

Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, said that “Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history”.

Dr Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, said that Borlaug “has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much”.

It really is a sad day. Please read the entire linked article to see the genius that the world lost today.

via Norman Borlaug dies aged 95 | Mail Online.