The doctor in charge, who is now on trial, reportedly lured teenagers with unwanted pregnancies by offering to help with abortion. They would be locked up there until they gave birth, whereupon they would be forced to give up their babies for a token fee of around 20,000 naira (170 dollars, 135 euros).
→ Babies for sale in Nigeria [via Warren Ellis]
As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honey bees surrounds it, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honey bee mass to 47 °C. The honey bees can just about tolerate this temperature, but the hornet cannot survive more than 46 °C, so it dies. Often several bees perish along with the intruder, but the death of the hornet scout prevents it from summoning reinforcements which would wipe out the colony.
→ Wikipedia on the giant Asian hornet
[audio:The_Cave_Part_3.mp3]
Rose-Marie Gascoigne of New Orleans was the first to answer. She had sat with her lightboard for hours each evening, accompanied by two disinterested tabbies. She said later that her heart had “just plain stopped” when the lights began to flicker on and off. “The whole world just held its breath. I could hear the blood rushing in my head. I knew what to do–what the hell else was that damn button for? It just took me a couple of days to work myself up to it. It was like sending a message to God.”
→ The loneliness engine [Via MetaFilter]
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
→ Hipster: The dead end of western civilization
And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
→ Giles Coren: Indefinite article, definitive anger
John Schula, 30, a Latino male from Montebello, and a 17-year-old boy were fatally wounded in what sheriff’s deputies described as a gang-related shooting in the 3900 block of Aleman Avenue at 10:45 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18. The double homicide ended a year of relative calm in Pico Rivera. It took place near where 57-year-old grandmother Maria Hicks was gunned down in August 2007 after trying to intervene when taggers were spray-painting graffiti on a wall in her neighborhood.
→ Los Angeles Times: The homicide report
