Interest

• Two men raise a lion cub named Christian for years, and are forced to release him when he got too big. This video shows their reunion.

• Impossible vertical 360 photo
• What Google News would look like in utopia.
• “Unicorn” found in Italy
• Pennsylvania experiments with painted “speed bumps” - optical illusions - which can be produced for much less than the real thing.
• Man from Oregon uses helium balloons strapped to a lawn chair to safely fly 200 miles, using a BB gun to slowly pop enough balloons to lower him to earth.

Ethics

• In contrast to heroic stories from the Sichuan earthquake, a secondary schoolteacher tells of how he fled rather than help his students evacuate: “I’m only really concerned about myself”.
• Writer Christopher Hitchens, who had initially opposed the designation of waterboarding as torture, decides to undergo the procedure himself. His conclusion: “Believe me, it’s torture!”
• Teenager from faith-healing family dies of treatable condition.
• Romanian rape victim is allowed to have an abortion that would usually be considered illegal
• Should we give convicts the same opportunity for (expensive) treatment?

Internet

• France government strikes a deal with its ISPs to block porn, terror, and hate web sites
• Associated Press draws up rules that require you to pay $12.50 every time you quote more than 5 words from any of their syndicated articles. Uh-oh!
• A stroll through Wikipedia shows disparities between the attention given to certain subjects: Call of Duty, the popular WWII game, has a longer content total than actual WWII articles.
• Speed test of the latest browsers shows Opera still ahead of the pack! (FF3 is ahead in RAM usage, but most computers have enough RAM, and most browsers use up unused RAM anyway to cache data.)

Science

• Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski takes a single e. coli bacterium and cultivates its offspring, which make a significant evolutionary shirt in the 31,500th generation.Some editors at Conservapedia take offense, demonstrating their ignorance of scientific research while hassling Lenski to reveal “his data”.
• Survey of undergrads finds the more men choose romance over success.

Consumer

• P&G evades sales tax by claiming that Pringles “are not potato chips”
• Up to 95% of returned gadgets in the US still work.

Games

• CEO of the company behind Crysis blames piracy for Crysis’s failure, claiming a 20:1 piracy ratio.
• Manager at THQ (Titan Quest) posts similar rant on a forum, taking aim against game piracy.
• Fallout 3 is tentatively banned in Australia
• Kotaku.au has a feature on the experience of a WoW poweleveller (i.e. person who hires someone to do his levelling for him )
• MMORPG Tycoon attempts to simulate making an MMORPG. Activities include setting zones with level ranges, and adjusting monster numbers.
• Only 2, 676 out of millions who were eligible choose to collect on the infamous “Hot Coffee” settlement of Grand Theft Auto
• PS3 exclusive MGS4 pokes fun at the Xbox360’s inferior capacity in-game: “There is no disc 2!”

US

• Damning article about John McCain’s ex-wife and how he left her after her disfuguring accident.
• McCain admits he doesn’t know how to use a computer.
  (To be fair, I don’t think Pak Lah does either…)
• The best of Dubya

Malaysia

There are intentionally no Malaysian political snippets this time :/

• Malaysian taxis voted worst in the world in a magazine survey.

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