Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/178738571?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, December 24, 2011
Model Tries to Smuggle Cocaine Inside Fake Breast and Butt Implants [Drugs]
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Friday, December 23, 2011
Literate Naruto Roleplay
Alright, let me start by saying how much I hate the word literate when used to describe skill level. It's too general and vague, anyone who's passed middle school could be literate. Nah. Let me make things more specific by saying 'advanced' Naruto roleplay. Or is that too pretentious?
Basically, I want this roleplay to stand out from other canon roleplays out there. Most canon roleplays lack the level of care or thought that original ones have; with this roleplay I want to change that. I'm a guy that loves roleplays, and loves Naruto. I'm tired of seeing Naruto roleplays go under because of lack of thought. This is no retelling of the Naruto canon, no 'next-generation' where the sons and daughters of the Rookie Nine become legendary ninja. I'm setting out to put a different twist on the Naruto Canon. Lemme stop the build up and get er done.
The Setting
The roleplay is set several hundred years from the Narutoverse as we know it, alternate reality. Technology is grand, almost cyberpunk in design [not as flashy and tron-ish though. there's no holograms here]. In this world, the way of the ninja has been outlawed, the Kages are dead, and the feudal lords are the only ones in power. It's a dark time, full of corruption and strife. How did it get to this point though?
Three hundred years ago, the Feudal Lords came together to devise a plot. The Lords feared the immense power of the Kage and their soldiers. They felt that in time, their positions would become irrelevant in the face of the ninja world. And so, they used their influence to brand the Kage as traitors. Ninja that refused to submit to the power of the Feudal Lords were executed. Each of the Kages were brought before the Lords, and executed in a live broadcast. After that, the ninja name became synonymous with treachery. The age of Ninja was over.
Today, Five Great Nations still retain chief power in the world. They maintain order with their Royal Guard; men and women who are the epitome of strength and skill who are in possession of the most advanced technology the world has to offer. However, only the wealthy receive protection from the Royal Guard. Those who cannot afford the protection tax are left to rot.
Although the Ninja Arts have been outlawed, they have by no means been totally eradicated. There a few out there who have attained knowledge and mastery of ninjutsu. It is even said that somewhere out there, there is an entire city that survives the Ninja Arts. Somewhere.
Like I said before, this is a distant future of the Naruto Universe. The give you an idea of what that means imagine the Land of Fire. Once graced with beautiful trees and forests, it is now inhabited entirely by skyscrapers and highways. It's like New York.
The Story
It's like a cross between Star Wars...with Kunai Knifes instead of Lightsabers, and a John Woo flick...with ninjas.
The story will revolve around the remnants of the ninja world; the retainers of the old ways, The Jinchuuriki; those who will bring about the Ninja World's revival, and those who are out to stop them. Joining up, you'll have three choices on character 'class'. 'User of Old Way', one who has somehow uncovered knowledge of ninja arts, and survives them as a practitioner, 'Jinchuuriki', one destined to become the host of one of the Tailed Beasts [and to be hunted by the Royal Guard and Feudal Lords at all costs], or a member of the Royal Guard.
At the start of the story, our nine Jinchuuriki will awaken to their powers. From that point on, they will be marked as public enemy no.1 by everyone around them. The story will take place all around the 5 Nations, as the Jinchuuriki seek to master their new found [or not so new found] powers. Or maybe the Jinchuuriki will forsake their destiny all together and run from it. It's up to them. Regardless...they will be hunted.
So yeah. That's the tale thus far.
Combat, Jutsu, and other mechanics...
Combat will be handled T1 style. Jutsu use will be dictated by a very strict system.
Seeing how ninjutsu is outlawed, even the strongest practitioner of ninja arts won't have a plethora of Jutsu. Depending on the type of character [Old Way, or Jinchuuriki] I'll place a base maximum on Jutsu number. This number obviously will expanded as time passes on in the roleplay as characters grow through battle. Jutsu can be of your own creation or canonical. Doesn't matter.
Given the nature of the roleplay, i'm looking at an every other day posting minimum. Probably. A decent number of players able to create some legible, detailed and well formed posts is all I ask.
And that's that. It's rough, but this is the basic gist of where I want to go with things. I just wanted to see if anyone would be interested in this? Suggestions? Anything?
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/wmdU2llJZjU/viewtopic.php
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Kenya HIV families torn between health or food (AP)
NAIROBI, Kenya ? Rosalia Adhiambo won't take the free anti-HIV drugs that would prolong her life. The spiraling price of food in Kenya means she can't afford to feed both her grandniece and herself.
So she feeds 5-year-old Emily and doesn't take her own medicine, fearing that the nausea she would get from taking the drugs without adequate food will make her too weak to look for work.
Prices for staple foods this year are almost twice as high as in 2009, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization says. The rising prices and a dwindling of funds for HIV programs mean countless poor families must decide whether to focus on the health of an HIV-positive adult or on a child's hunger.
Valerian Kamito, a nurse at the clinic that gives Adhiambo her food, says some patients are refusing to start treatment for HIV and around a quarter of his 1,555 patients on anti-HIV drugs are now skipping their medication.
"They say they cannot take them on an empty stomach," Kamito said. Before prices rose, he said, "it was very rare."
HIV-positive adults need 10 percent more calories than other people just to maintain their body weight. Children with HIV need between 30 percent to 50 percent more calories than other children. They will lose weight and be vulnerable to infections without those calories, said nutritionist Kate Greenaway from the aid agency Catholic Relief Services.
Annual inflation in Kenya is around 20 percent, but wages haven't kept pace. Around half of Kenyans live on less than $2 a day, including 52-year-old Adhiambo, who makes $1 each day she does housework.
"When there is nothing to eat, we go to bed hungry. I tell Emily it is because God did not send us food today," said Adhiambo, motioning to a cardboard picture of Jesus on the wall of their corrugated iron shack.
"Emily stands before that picture and prays, 'God, please remember to send us food tomorrow,'" said Adhiambo.
She had work for two weeks last month, but the younger women get most of the jobs. Adhiambo relies on her daily free meal of rice, beans and vegetables from a clinic run by Catholic Relief Services in the Mathare slum, though she sometimes misses that if she is searching for work. The staff there are trying to persuade her to take her anti-HIV drugs.
But Adhiambo carries the food home and gives most of it to Emily, who isn't signed up for the CRS program, though workers there are trying to get her into it. The bright-eyed little girl in the torn blue dress is almost all that's left of Adhiambo's family. Adhiambo's brother, two sisters and husband are all dead. Emily's mother is alive, but ill. She refuses to be tested. Emily has been tested and is HIV positive.
Adhiambo needs to take drugs called anti-retrovirals, or ARVs, and so will Emily. Taken regularly, the medicine can prolong life by years, possibly decades. But if taken sporadically, the medicine will lose its effectiveness.
Patients say the medicine can cause nausea, fatigue, and diarrhea at first, especially if there is no food to go with it, said Greenaway. The drugs also cause a ravenous hunger as the body starts to recover. Adhiambo, afraid that the side effects will prevent her from working, refuses to take the pills.
The clinic gives 400 of its patients, Adhiambo among them, "prescribed food" to eat with their medicines so they'll continue the treatment. But most take the meals home to share with their families, said Kamito. The program has a long waiting list. The financial crisis means there is no money to expand it.
Globally, there has been around a 10 percent decline in HIV/AIDS funding, said Michel Sidibe, the UNAIDS executive director. The world's top funder of public health programs ? the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria ? has disbursed $15 billion since 2002, but it cannot afford to pay for any new or expanded programs until 2014.
Poverty, meanwhile, continues to eat at the gains made by modern medicine in fighting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Twenty to 30 percent of HIV-positive patients in the developing world drop out in the first two years of treatment, said Nils Grede, the deputy chief of the World Food Program's nutrition and HIV/AIDS unit.
"Barriers to continue the treatment ... are often related to poverty. You don't have the money to pay for the bus, you don't have enough food, so you spend your time on trying to make sure that your family eats," Grede told The Associated Press in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
"People adhere much better to drug regimens when there is food," said Greenaway. "But in poor families, that might mean mothers who want to stay strong have to decide whether to take something from their children's plates."
Adhiambo's neighbor Ishmael Abongo, a 35-year-old father of four, must do just that. He and his wife Mary are both HIV positive, as is one of their sons. The whole family shares the clinic's food. When he has found work, Abongo takes a bit of porridge from dinner and saves it for the morning so he isn't too dizzy for a two-hour bus journey.
"I know it is important to take the drugs," he said.
He recounted knowing four people who did not take the pills because they had no food. They are now all dead, Abongo said.
A clinic social worker visited Adhiambo in her tiny shack in December, trying to persuade her to take her medication or risk dying, and leaving Emily with no family to care for her. But Adhiambo was more worried about their present situation.
"What will happen to her if I take these drugs and I get sick?" Adhiambo asked, adding that if she can't work or even walk because of side effects from the medicine they won't have any food.
Eventually, Adhiambo stood up. She needed to find some clothes or a floor that needed washing. She was two months behind with the rent ? $15 a month ? and could be evicted.
The white-winged Jesus that Emily prays to was shown in the picture walking through a garden, nothing like the smelly alley outside the shack.
Words below picture said: "May my prayers come before you, that you heal me according to your will."
___
Associated Press writer Luc van Kemenade in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia contributed to this report.
___
Follow Katharine Houreld at http://twitter.com/khoureld
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Thursday, December 22, 2011
MLK parade bomber sentenced to 32 years in prison
(AP)? SPOKANE, Wash. ? A federal judge was not swayed by the last-ditch attempt from an Army veteran with extensive ties to white supremacists to change his guilty plea in a plot to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.
Kevin Harpham said in court he only agreed to plead guilty to planting a bomb filled with poison-laced shrapnel along the downtown Spokane parade route to avoid a possible life sentence, telling the judge: "I am not guilty of the acts that I am accused of and that I plead guilty to."
U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush responded by handing down the maximum punishment at his discretion.
"I am distressed that you appear not the least bit apologetic," said Quackenbush, as he sentenced Harpham to 32 years in prison Tuesday. The possible prison sentence was negotiated in the plea bargain as between 27 and 32 years.
Harpham blamed the judge for not giving his defense team enough time. The 37-year-old said he did not intend to injure people with the bomb he placed in downtown Spokane prior to the January parade.
Rather, he intended for the shrapnel to hit the side of a building as a show of protest against the multiculturalism celebrated by the parade, he said.
"I was making a statement that there are people out there who don't agree with these ideas," Harpham said. He likened himself to a Christian protesting gay marriage, "but a bit more dangerous or extreme."
The judge said he was perplexed because Harpham was honorably discharged from the Army and had no criminal record, saying the previously law-abiding Harpham seemed to be influenced by a "shrill and caustic and vitriolic" culture fueled by talk media.
"That is contrary to what this community and this country is about," Quackenbush said.
Just before he was scheduled to be sentenced, Harpham's lawyer tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his guilty plea by noting that a newly hired defense expert questioned whether the explosive device in question met the legal definition of a bomb.
Harpham said he intended to seek an appeal, which he has 14 days to file.
Federal prosecutors said it was important that a long sentence be imposed in the case.
"Acts of hate like this one have no place in our country in 2011," said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division in Washington, D.C.
Federal officials have said Harpham acted alone.
The pipe bomb was loaded with lead fishing weights coated in rat poison, which can inhibit blood clotting in wounds, officials have said. The bomb was discovered and disabled before it could explode.
The parade on Jan. 17 drew a crowd of about 2,000 on a cold winter morning. It was forced onto an alternative route after the bomb was found. Harpham walked in the parade and took pictures of young black children and of a Jewish man who was wearing a yarmulke, prosecutors have said.
Harpham was arrested March 9 at his rural home near Addy, Wash.
The September plea deal charged Harpham with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, and the hate crime of placing the bomb in an effort to target minorities. Prosecutors dropped charges of using a firearm in relation to a crime of violence and unauthorized possession of an unregistered explosive device. If convicted, he could have faced up to life in prison.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has said that Harpham made more than 1,000 postings on a white supremacist website. The center also has said that Harpham belonged to a neo-Nazi group.
Harpham served from 1996 to 1999 in the Army at what is now Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma. His lawyers have said Harpham had not been recently employed.
He has remained in the Spokane County Jail without bail since his arrest. Under the deal, Harpham would remain on probation for the rest of his life once he leaves prison.
During his sentencing, a suspicious package was found near the federal courthouse, but a bomb squad determined it was not an explosive.
Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsGamecore/~3/6WpBFDMMp2w/
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Sunday, December 18, 2011
Cowboys take 31-15 lead into 4th quarter (AP)
TAMPA, Fla. ? Tony Romo threw for three touchdowns and ran for a fourth score Saturday night, helping the Dallas Cowboys stop a two-game losing streak with a 31-15 victory over the struggling Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The win gave the Cowboys (8-6) a half-game lead over the New York Giants in the NFC East. The Bucs (4-10) lost for the eighth straight time.
Romo threw a pair of 8-yard TD passes to Miles Austin and Dez Bryant in the first quarter, then finished a seven-play, 89-yard drive with a 9-yarder to Laurent Robinson to make it 21-0 with just under 5 minutes remaining in the second quarter. Romo made it 28-0 on a quarterback sneak in the closing seconds of the opening half.
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Libyan students in US worry about returning home (AP)
EAST LANSING, Mich. ? More than two years ago, Faeirouz Elbergwa was among a select group of Libyans sent by her government to an American university to train for the nation's diplomatic corps. As she prepares for the final stage of her studies, she and her colleagues now find themselves in an odd state of limbo ? a vestige of a regime that no longer exists and unsure what might await them in their much-changed homeland.
Elbergwa, 27, and 18 colleagues in a Libyan diplomatic training program at Michigan State University watched in amazement during the last year as the North African nation was convulsed by a violent revolution that ended with the overthrow and death of leader Moammar Gadhafi.
When the regime fell, many of the students were elated. Elbergwa said she and her family "took the side of the revolution from day one." But she wonders if people in her war-torn country will think of her as a would-be Gadhafi government official when it's time for her to return.
"Maybe some of them will say I'm loyal to this family," she said. "I think I don't care. It's what's in my heart that counts."
Student Mohammed Gibril also wonders about his future in Libya. "I might return home and nothing happens; I might return home and something happens," he said.
As Libya's new leaders struggle to establish order in the country, the students on the campus 5,000 miles away are trying to puzzle out their future with the help of relatives at home and authorities in the United States.
The State Department has approved the necessary visas for them to stay in the United States, and they intend to continue with their program, which will resume next month on the campus of American University in Washington, D.C. If they appear to be in danger when it's time to return to Libya later next year, the U.S. could consider granting asylum.
"The perception is just because these folks received the scholarship from the Gadhafi family they are somehow aligned ... with the Gadhafi family," said Eugenia Zacks-Carney, an immigration attorney who has been working with the Libyans at Michigan State. "Nothing could be further from the truth."
Michigan State launched the program in 2010 under a contract with Libya's National Economic Development Board to provide training in English, political science and international relations for future foreign service officials. Elbergwa, who describes her family as middle-class, was working toward a master's degree in international relations in Benghazi when she entered the program. She said that for those interested in public service in Libya, there was no alternative to dealing with the Gadhafi regime.
"Everything in the country was controlled by their family. ... We liked to call Libya `Gadhafi's farm,'" said Elbergwa, speaking in fluent English. "We lived by it. Somehow we accepted it for a long time."
When the uprising began in February, she said, her two brothers joined the fight and her father began driving an ambulance. She was heartbroken at first, seeing the broadcast images of suffering and mayhem, but then she joined anti-Gadhafi protests on campus.
Gibril also was torn. "I don't like seeing people being killed, but I was happy to see what he represented die," said Gibril, who has worked in the human rights field. "I wanted him to face justice."
About 20 students in the program, including those loyal to the Gadhafi regime, decided to return home when NATO forces began attacking government targets, but the others stayed on.
Hamza El-Najah, 28, another student in the program, said it's not clear now when stability will come to the nation.
"As the world knows, they don't have freedom for more than 42 years," said El-Najah, whose family owns a jewelry store in a town about 60 miles south of Tripoli. "Right now, they get freedom. What do you think ? use this freedom in the right way or the wrong way?"
Gibril said he would like to return home after the program ends later this year.
One concern is the dozens of militias that rose up during the war and now are reluctant to disband or submit to central authority. Also, there are still Gadhafi loyalists.
"I know there are still people killing in his name," said Elbergwa, whose father resigned from the Libyan Army two years after Gadhafi came to power in 1969.
Sipping coffee in an off-campus cafe, Elbergwa, dressed in a casual sweater and multihued headscarf, said the overthrow of Gadhafi leaves a country with "nothing" ? no infrastructure, education, health care or political culture. With a huge rebuilding process ahead, she said, she hopes her nation will accept her help.
When he returns after his diplomatic training, El-Najah said he will carry a simple message.
"We have to forgive each other," he said. "I will tell them: You should forgive if you want to build Libya."
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