What would Jesus do (with £15,000)?

Obsessive compulsive sufferer stole £15,000 from partner and spent the lot on radios
Evening Courier: LINK

Better question is “What Would I do with £15,000″? Jello Pool. No wait, buy a monkey. they’re so cute. and c’mon now, who doesn’t like having feces thrown at them? Answer: Me.

A FANATIC stole nearly £15,000 from his partner – and spent it all on radios.
Stephen Hudson, 56, of Rishworthian Court, Copley, Halifax, surrounded himself with the radios – putting his favourite one in the middle – and often had them all on at the same time, a court heard.

Hudson forged his 71-year-old partner Elizabeth Whitehead’s signature on cheques made out to himself. A total of £14,916 was taken from her account between 2004 and 2007, while she was a resident in Woodfield Grange Nursing Home, Woodfield Drive, Greet-land.

John Bull, prosecuting, said Hudson had admitted to Mrs Whitehead’s son he had taken the money and spent it all on radios.

Police found about 50 wireless sets in his home.

Mr Bull said: “He used the money to buy radios – two black bin liners with radios in them were produced.” Hudson admitted three offences of forgery, three of using a false instrument and asked for a further 93 similar offences to be taken into consideration. Bradford Crown Court heard Hudson had suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder for 30 years. It manifested itself in him buying radios.

Mr Bull said the couple met nine years ago when Hudson worked for a taxi company and she was a customer.

Mr Bull said Mrs Whitehead would initially sign the cheques but Hudson began to fill in greater amounts and started forging her signature.

Jonathan Gibson, for Hudson, said it was an “unusual and exceptional” case.

He said Hudson had suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder for many years and often surrounded himself with radios, putting them all on at the same time.

“There is a history of hiding radios and disposing of them,” said Mr Gibson.

Recorder Peter Babb said: “In the ordinary course of events that sort of breach of trust would result in a prison sentence for obvious reasons.”

He said Hudson had taken advantage of the situation but said he could draw back from custody in his case.

“It was not frittered away – it was spent on radios which you had a compulsion to purchase,” Recorder Babb said. Hudson was given an 18-month community order with supervision.

Curling finally getting some Cred.

Rock stars courted for curling reality show
The Star: LINK

Curling is so Boss. That’s my tagline. it’s copyrighted, actually, NBC so don’t steal it. or else!

Bon Jovi, Springsteen, said to be closet curlers, courted for NBC series that could lead to Olympics. Move over American Idol and make room for Rockstar Curling, a reality television show that may indeed have a rock-star connection.
NBC confirmed yesterday it has an exclusive option to air a 10-episode sports reality show that will give the winners a shot at competing in the U.S. championships and even going to the 2010 Olympics.
And one aspect that would make this a draw to the button for NBC is a plan to land closet curlers Bruce Springsteen or Jon Bon Jovi as part of the show, assuming the rockers aren’t worried what being connected to a sport with brooms might do to their images.
According to sources, the two rock stars are among a group of entertainment types who rent arena time on occasion to pick up brooms instead of guitars.
Organizers are trying to negotiate a deal to get one of them involved, possibly as a host.
The series is the brainchild of New York-based sports marketing agency mktpartners and Carr-Hughes Productions of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Mktgpartners has an office in Toronto and has an advertising commitment from the likes of Tourism Canada, sources say.
“This show is all about the opportunity to expose American viewers to curling,” said Colin Campbell, Canadian president of mktgpartners and one of the creators of the show. “We feel there might be some great athletes out there who might develop into good curlers given the chance.”
While a curling reality show wouldn’t be considered that unusual in Canada, where top events draw more than 1 million viewers, it’s hardly a mainstream sport south of the border.
Generally, the only time it gets mentioned on U.S. television is when comedians make fun of the sport.
The jokes usually revolve around the use of brooms and the belief curlers are the least athletic of all Olympians.
But curling was one of the surprise hits of the last two Olympics for NBC, enough so that NBC aired 24 matches live from Turin on one of its cable channels.
Although curling seldom gets more than 800,000 viewers on NBC, it once drew higher ratings than an NHL playoff game that aired at the same time the next day.
Needless to say, the U.S. Curling Association is thrilled with the prospect of 10 weeks of exposure on a national network.
“We feel that the Rockstar concept is innovative, creative and will help U.S. Curling develop new awareness, interest and participation in our sport across America,” said association chief operating office Rick Patzke.
The show would work a lot like the Idol series, though it would most likely air on weekend afternoons.
The show would involve U.S.-wide tryouts starting this year, open to anyone 18 or older. A panel of coaches will select two teams – five men and five women – to train for six months, all expenses paid, at Lake Placid, N.Y.
They would train eight hours a day under professional coaches before going to regional playdowns for the 2010 U.S. Olympic trials in February 2009.
If they win, they’re off to the Vancouver Olympics, unlikely as that may seem.
The tryouts, training and national competition will all be part of the series.
“If the winners get anywhere, it will be because they’ve earned it,” said Campbell.
Patzke said the television teams would be given no advantage.
“They would have to enter the U.S. Olympic team trials playdowns like any other U.S. Olympic-eligible team,” he said.
“There are no special concessions.”
Mktgpartners Canadian president Colin Campbell said in a statement that curling has a unique appeal to advertisers.
“The sport of curling is clutter-free compared to mainstream American sports sponsorship,” he said, “and Rockstar Curling is an excellent opportunity for brands to capture the attention of consumers, leading up to the Olympics.”

Virtual Partying! finally

It’s like a virtual Facebook for people who love to rock! yeah…sarcasm, get some.

The Medicated Child

PBS Frontline: LINK

There is this one clip that I wish I could isolate. It’s titled “Jessica’s Story.” The clip is an actually child who seems to have bipolar disorder – being aggressive, cheerfully saying that she wants to smash her parents brains’ in, and periods up to 2 weeks of depression.

here’s the whole documentary: LINK

the Real Breakfast Club

A teen film about the real thing
CNN: LINK

I think Bender Said it best: “You mean the Breakfast Club Sandwich?”

(AP) — If John Hughes ever got into nonfiction, he’d find a kindred spirit in filmmaker Nanette Burstein.
American Teen

Director Nanette Burstein (center) stands with the cast of “American Teen” at the Sundance Film Festival.

Burstein’s documentary “American Teen” eagerly places its four main subjects — students at the only high school in Warsaw, Indiana — into the archetypes Hughes helped cement in ’80s movies like “The Breakfast Club.” There’s the homecoming queen, the artsy girl, the jock, the loner.

Thing is, this is real life. And as their senior years unfold on camera, viewers see layers of each person peeled away. The homecoming queen fires guns for fun and vandalizes a rival’s home. The jock faces pressure from his Elvis impersonator father to join the military.

Their stories are told in cinema verite fashion, spiced up by zippy fiction-style editing and a series of cartoon sequences representing the dreams and nightmares of these 17-year-olds (Playing in the NBA! Finding nirvana at Notre Dame!).

After premiering last month at the Sundance Film Festival, the movie will be released theatrically by Paramount Vantage. It looks set to make unlikely stars of the young people, now 20, who shared 10 months with Burstein’s cameras in the 2005-06 school year.

Already, well-received screenings meant Jake Tusing, the socially awkward marching band and video game geek, is marveling at how others root him on. He even started getting approached by women offering dates.

“I learned that people liked me. I never pictured myself as a likable person, but seeing people cheering for me in the theater, that really lifted my spirits,” he said in an interview following the Sundance premiere in Park City, Utah.

“Even I liked me more,” said Tusing, who spoke softly and wore a “Legend of Zelda” T-shirt. “I never liked myself in high school. That always wore on me a lot.”

The charm of “American Teen” comes from its intimacy and its subjects’ small town lack of guile. This is not the rehearsed, surface vapidity of “The Hills” or any of the quick-hit network TV reality shows.

Burstein, whose previous films include “The Kid Stays in the Picture” and “On the Ropes,” was careful with her casting. She spoke with hundreds of teens at 10 Midwestern high schools, and struck upon Tusing, Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens and Megan Krizmanich after a round of videotaped interviews.

“They’re really funny, really articulate and self-aware in a good way,” she said. “And they had drama going on.”

Bailey is a media-savvy queen bee type — familiar if you’ve seen “Mean Girls” — who plots jealously, spreading topless pictures of an enemy through e-mail. Krizmanich, the aspiring filmmaker, falls into a doomed relationship that’s ended via text message.

Clemens, pressured to produce on the basketball court to land a college scholarship, becomes a ball hog. His father tells him repeatedly that if sports don’t work out, he should go into the military.

“I always thought of myself as a team player, but when it got serious in terms of scholarship or Iraq, I could tell I took it too much onto myself,” Clemens said in an interview.

There’s a happy ending; Clemens got his scholarship and is now a sophomore playing guard at Indiana Tech. But there are no “where are they now” type wrap-ups at the end of the movie. Burstein keeps it focused on her subject: the specific worries and stories of the modern high school senior.

“It’s about being 17,” she said. “I thought going into it that it was all going to be about the pressure of your peers. I realized that was an element of that, but you also had this identity crisis because of the pressure of your parents, and the future decisions you had to make, that you know nothing about.”

Speaking of Mummys…

Controversial sculptor’s latest: ‘The Oprah Sarcophagus’

FROM SUN-TIMES WIRES: LINK

Some of you out there really worship Oprah. Well, now you finally have a golden idol.

Controversial sculptor Daniel Edwards’ latest creation is “The Oprah Sarcophagus,” a gold-colored bronze and a very full-figured likeness of Chicago talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey.
» Click to enlarge image
“The Oprah Sarcophagus” is the latest celebrity-centric sculpture from artist Daniel Edwards.

The sculpture features Oprah — famous for battling her weight — with, as one report describes it, “a full-breasted woman with generous child-bearing hips.”

The image is attached to a block in the shape of a burial chamber, much like an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.

Why Oprah? Edwards has caused stirs before with his sculptures of celebrities — “The Birth of Sean Preston” (Britney Spears giving birth), “Paris Hilton Autopsy,” “Suri Cruise’s First Poop” — and has said this piece “pays homage to the closest thing America has to a living deity.”

A Rose for Mummily

Mummy Found In Renter’s Bathtub
News 5 Phoenix: LINK

I choose this picture because the caption was “the mummy is the one on the right.”

PHOENIX — A years-old mummified body has been found in a cottage bathtub beneath layers of wood, plastic, dirt and sand, Phoenix police said.

The owners of several cottages said they grew suspicious after the renter stopped sending monthly checks, officers said.

The landlords entered the property on Friday and found trash stacked from floor to ceiling, said Sgt. Joel Tranter of the Phoenix Police Department.

Once they reached the bathroom, they discovered the bathtub was covered with plywood and plastic, Tranter said. Underneath the material, they found layers of dirt and sand, Tranter said.

As the owners began removing the dirt, they saw a human leg and ran to call police, according to Tranter.

Homicide investigators said they are labeling the incident as a “death unknown.”

The entire bathtub was extracted with the mummified body and dirt in tact and transported to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office for examination, Tranter said.

Tranter said preliminary information indicated that the person buried in the tub had been dead for a number of years.

Investigators said they have identified the most recent resident on the cottage and are currently following-up on leads, Tranter said. The person’s identity is currently being withheld.

The property owners said they rented the cottage to a man in 1995. They said they had received regular rent payments from 1995 through the summer of 2007 when the rent payments stopped.

The landlords said they briefly visited the property last summer and believed that the unit was abandoned.

"This can’t work, She’s Christian, and I’m a Jew."

UPDATE: Mistrial in Microwave Death

READ THIS FIRST
daily tar gum: LINK

Only one month old, Paris Talley died of “high-heat internal injuries,” seemingly due to being microwaved, according to CNN. Her mother, China Arnold is about to begin trial in Ohio for the baby’s death and faces the death penalty. Arriving home after a heavy night of drinking in 2005, Arnold claims to have given the baby a bottle and then fallen asleep. When waking the next morning, she found the baby unconscious. Arnold argues knowing nothing about the circumstances surrounding her daughter’s death, including the burns.

Police Detective Michael Galbraith recalls her saying, “If I hadn’t gotten so drunk, I guess my baby wouldn’t have died.” While that is probably a fair assessment on her part, does her intoxication therefore provide a platform for her to escape legal punishment? With “40 percent of a pint of high-proof rum” in her system, can Arnold be in charge of being fully cognizant of her actions? Maybe not, but is it equally unfair for her to be let off the hook for her irresponsibility?

If she had double-parked or committed any similarly small offense as a result of her skewed judgment, she would have been held accountable. It was a personal choice for this woman – as it is for most people who do so – to abuse alcohol. Unlike unmanageable mental disorders, which allow accused criminals to plead insanity, consuming alcohol – except in distinct case of the disease alcoholism – is self-inflicted and completely controllable.

But if the woman was to ever plead guilty to putting her child into the microwave, an insanity plea may not be far off. In actuality, there is no difference between the sadism required to put an infant into the dumpster or the microwave. But because one of those things is so unheard of, we are quick to typify it as being a concern of insanity as opposed to sheer neglect or irresponsibility.

To do something so vile to a helpless child shows no value for human life. There is no justification for it. Certainly, being drunk causes rationalization to float out the window. But in such circumstances, it is hard to see that as an explanation. Extreme cases like Arnold’s may make some New Jersey citizens regret having given up the option to invoke capital punishment.

Judge Rules Mistrial In China Arnold Case
whiotv: LINK

DAYTON, Ohio — A judge declared a mistrial Monday in the case of a woman accused of killing her month-old baby by burning her in a microwave, finding that new defense witnesses bolster her innocence claim.

Judge John Kessler made the decision after hearing testimony privately from a juvenile who said he was at the apartment complex of defendant China Arnold on the August 2005 night that her infant died.

The judge did not give details about juvenile’s testimony.

The ruling comes after hours of closed door discussions between prosecutors, China Arnold’s attorney and the judge.

Closing arguments were supposed to begin Monday morning but were delayed for undisclosed reasons. The jury was asked not to report for duty.

China Arnold is the Dayton woman accused of burning her month-old baby to death in a microwave oven.

A 12-member jury has heard six days of testimony and a parade of witnesses in China Arnold’s trial. Arnold herself did not testify.

The 27-year-old was charged with aggravated murder in the August 2005 death of Paris Talley. Arnold has pleaded not guilty and could face the death penalty if convicted.

Severe Weather Alert: Winter Storm Approaching

Testimony Ends In China Arnold Murder Trial

After a long day of hearing testimony Friday, the defense has rested its case in the China Arnold muder trial in Dayton.

Earlier in the day the trial was put on hold Thursday morning after the judge asked the jury to take a break after only hearing from a few witnesses.

The judge said transportation issues stopped the next witnesses from getting to the courthouse.

The witnesses later arrived late Thursday afternoon from the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. The inmates testified they had once been incarcerated in the Montgomery County Jail with Arnold.

Both women contradicted earlier statements from another inmate witness for the prosecution who said Arnold had told her, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it,” when talking about the microwave death of her daughter, Paris Talley.

The defense witnesses said Arnold never talked to anyone about her pending murder case.

After the defense rested, the prosecution had a chance to call several rebuttal witnesses. The prosecution rested their case at approximately 5pm Thursday.

Case of the Frozen Addicts

Surprising Clue to Parkinson’s
Time Magazine: LINK
We watched a PBS video of this condition in PSYCH 100 last week. This is TIME magazine’s article about a Heroin-copy drug that was made incorrectly and caused severe Parkinson’s instantly.

When George Carillo arrived at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose one steamy July day in 1982, he seemed more a mannequin than a man. The 42-year-old heroin addict was bent over and twisted, drooling and unable to speak; almost every muscle was immobilized. No one knew what to make of his condition, so a call went out for Dr. J. William Langston, the hospital’s chief neurologist. Langston took one look and was amazed. Carillo’s symptoms suggested that he had been suffering for at least a decade from Parkinson’s disease, a nervous system disorder that causes tremors and a gradual loss of mobility. But that hardly seemed plausible: Parkinson’s rarely strikes anyone under the age of 50.

Using stiffened fingers to scrawl answers to doctors’ questions, Carillo managed to provide a few clues. The symptoms had come on suddenly after he and his girlfriend, Juanita Lopez, 3l, had tried a new synthetic heroin. Though the drug had caused an odd burning sensation when injected and hallucinations, they continued to use it for three days; two days later both had frozen into living statues.

With help from colleagues at Stanford University, where he teaches, Langston located Lopez and had her hospitalized. A tip from a neurologist in Watsonville, 30 miles away, led him to two more cases: a pair of brothers, both addicts in their 20s, with advanced Parkinson’s symptoms. By now Langston was alarmed. He called a press conference to announce that bad heroin was on the streets; he urged that anyone suffering from stiffness and tremors come forward. The appeal uncovered three more cases.

The seven cases in Santa Clara County attracted the attention of local drugenforcement officials and Parkinson’s researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who joined the hunt to identify the deadly ingredient in samples of the drug obtained by police. Their task was made easier by an alert toxicologist at the county crime laboratory, who recalled the 1977 case of a Maryland graduate student who had developed Parkinson’s symptoms after injecting himself with a home-brewed opiate. The student had been trying to produce MPPP, a substance similar to the pain-killer Demerol, but had accidentally created a related chemical called MPTP. Langston asked Stanford University Chemist Ian Irwin to test the samples for the drug. Sure enough, MPTP was there.

While public health authorities worried about additional cases of drug- induced Parkinson’s and police pondered how to stop the sale of a drug that was not illegal (see box), medical researchers could hardly contain their excitement. The tragic outbreak in California could hold the key to understanding and treating Parkinson’s disease, which afflicts some 350,000 Americans.

The scientists quickly turned to the task. For years research on Parkinson’s disease has been limited by the lack of an animal model on which to test new drugs and treatments. Would MPTP induce Parkinson’s in animals? The answer, NIMH Researchers Sanford Markey and R. Stanley Burns soon discovered, was no in rats but yes in monkeys. Says Markey: “That was probably the biggest breakthrough in this story.”

The next step was to find out how MPTP did its damage. Doctors have known since the 1930s that Parkinson’s occurs as a result of the deterioration of a small, darkly pigmented region of the brain called the substantia nigra. This region produces most of the brain’s supply of dopamine, a vital chemical in the transmission of nerve signals. Normally, people lose 5% to 8% of the cells in this region each decade of their lives and suffer no serious consequences. But for reasons that are unclear, the loss is more rapid in the case of Parkinson’s victims; once approximately 80% of these cells are gone, the symptoms appear. The usual treatment is a drug called L-dopa, which is converted into dopamine in the brain, but the efficacy of the drug may decline after years of use.

MPTP’s role soon became clear. Researchers learned that once the chemical enters the bloodstream, it is converted into another molecule (called MPP+) that appears to attack the substantia nigra like a guided missile, causing the kind of damage found in all Parkinson’s victims. Later experiments showed that if the conversion of MPTP to MPP+ was blocked with chemical inhibitors, a laboratory animal would not develop Parkinsonian symptoms even if given large doses of MPTP. Would human victims also respond to such treatment? At least one drug that blocks MPTP metabolism, Deprenyl, is already used in Europe to treat Parkinson’s disease in its final stages. Langston suspects that if used much earlier, “Deprenyl might actually retard the progress of the disease.” He has applied for FDA permission to test his theory on Parkinson’s victims.

The MPTP cases have led some scientists to suspect that most Parkinson’s disease is caused by exposure to toxic substances similar to MPTP. Researchers are looking for culprit chemicals in one rural area of Canada, where the incidence of Parkinson’s runs five times higher than in other areas, and on the island of Guam, where, until 1965, one out of five deaths was due to a form of Parkinson’s. The United Parkinson Foundation in Chicago meanwhile has mailed questionnaires to 36,000 Parkinson’s sufferers around the country, asking them to name every town in which they have ever lived, their drinking- water sources and industries located within a 25-sq.-mi. radius of their homes. Explains Executive Director Judy Rosner: “We want to get a handle on environmental influences.”

California public health officials are facing the more immediate problem of what to do about MPTP exposure among addicts. Langston and a team of investigators from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have determined that more than 300 people in the state have used the drug and that it is still being sold on the street. The CDC is now working with state authorities to stem the tide of MPTP and stop it from spreading beyond California.

But no one knows what will become of those already exposed. Of 150 MPTP users examined by CDC researchers, as many as half had subtle signs of Parkinson’s. Says Langston: “There may be a large number of people out there with half the nerve cells they’re supposed to have.” In ten or 15 years, he predicts, as these addicts continue to lose substantia nigra cells as part of the normal aging process, California may become the scene of a Parkinson’s epidemic.