"Hassan was captured on a surveillance camera setting the mini-blazes," see, so they arrested him and went on back home to sleep on their soft beds, not knowing a fiery menace was still lurking in the placid hallways of the prestigious high school. Because Hassan wasn't even in school when the latest string of trashcan, etc. fires broke out this week. Fiery doom is coming from inside the building. And, the Daily News reports, the copycat pyro is a mad criminal genius!

"I'm smart enough - you can't catch me," read a note left at one of the fires, according to FDNY sources. Another note appeared to be in hieroglyphics.

Not to alarm you, parents, but it appears that a twisted teenage Egyptologist has declared fiery war on your children's place of learning while bungling cops focus their attention on a patsy! (Mohammed's dad says this is a case of racial profiling).

If this turns out to be viral marketing for some Stuyvesant kid's version of 'The Rule of Four,' there will be some serious ass-kicking.
[Pic via]

You know, Ed Meese III, it is nice that you have come around, in some fashion, to the idea that we maybe shouldn't have the largest prison population in the world. Seriously, good for you.

But also, and more importantly: fuck you, Ed Meese.

It was actually Reagan's Attorney General, Mr. Ed Meese, who attempted to criminalize pornography and abortion, and who packed the federal judiciary with reactionary "tough-on-crime" assholes.

Ed Meese, once again as Attorney General, chaired the National Drug Policy Board. And during his tenure, federal spending on drug "enforcement" (arrests and seizures) increased by $700 million while drug prevention and education programs decreased. Ed Meese decided every worker in America should be drug tested all the time.

Oh, Bush-appointed former judge who is now concerned about overzealous prosecution, what is your complaint?

"A joint on a yacht, and the whole thing is forfeited," said Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush.

Funny! You are mad, as a conservative, that the government is seizing private property. Do you know who pioneered that approach to fighting drugs? Attorney General Ed Meese!

So, Ed Meese, we respectfully disagree with you, when you say that "liberal ideas of extending the power of the state" are to blame for an out-of-control criminal justice system. You are, after all, the Ed Meese who said once said this:

U.S News & World Report: You criticize the Miranda ruling, which gives suspects the right to have a lawyer present before police questioning. Shouldn't people, who may be innocent, have such protection?
Meese: Suspects who are innocent of a crime should. But the thing is, you don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.

But Ed Meese does not actually care about the massive and growing prison population. What he is mad about is that there are too many laws, in general.

"It's a violation of federal law to give a false weather report," Mr. Meese said. "People get put in jail for importing lobsters."

Maybe they do! Maybe there is a guy in jail, somewhere in America, for importing a lobster. But millions more get put in jail for smoking weed. And we think we should probably deal with that before we get to work fixing this "false weather report" zero tolerance policy that you are suddenly so concerned about.

Asshole.

"While I'm innocent, I'm sorry to all my fans and supporters for this embarrassment," Carter said.
Then he drove off in his shiny black Mercedes.

Ouch.
[NYDN]

The extracted, liquidized fat sold for $15,000 a liter, report the BBC, and it apparently went to "European countries." Four people have been arrested and five, adds the journalist with a straight face, remain "at large." Some of those captured were carrying soft drinks bottles of human fat. To reiterate: bottles of human motherfucking fat. One of them admitted that they'd been luring the chubby with fake job offers, then bumping them off, in the Huanaco and Pasco regions for up to three decades. Police estimate that they may be behind the disappearances of up to 60 people.

The gang has been referred to as the Pishtacos, after an ancient Peruvian legend of killers who attack people on lonely roads and murder them for their fat.

The genesis of this ancient legend is not so hard to trace. The last alleged murder happened in September. Before you get comfortable, and laugh at the people in Peru:

Gen Felix Burga, head of Peru's police criminal division, said there were indications that "an international network trafficking human fat" was operating from Peru.

Stay off those lonely roads.

The suit was probably inevitable. As we first reported, the Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has been looking for victims of scammy ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. Less than a week later, the firm's suit has hit federal district court in Northern California.

You can read the initial complaint in full here.

Neither gaming startup Zynga nor social network Facebook actually originates the advertisements in question; instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make reportedly large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz." TechCrunch has run an aggressive series of articles, cataloged at the bottom of this post.

Zynga reportedly takes in close to one-third of its revenue from "commercial offers" like those, and Facebook does well too, as KC&R lawyers point out in their complaint. An excerpt (click to enlarge):

Swift's attorneys also point to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus' damning video confession that "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues" in their complaint, indicating it will be a significant piece of courtroom evidence, just as we predicted.

The prospect of being on the hook for massive damages has to make both Zynga and Facebook's investors sweat. Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley, with VCs having valued it in the billions of dollars, while Zynga counts the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its major investors. Yet both companies have come to rely on greasy advertisers for much of their revenue; in addition to the game-ad scammers, Facebook is also sells ad to marketers who resort to tactics like using stolen pictures of apparent underaged girls to promote their products. If the company's are found to be liable of helping con customers by working with these sorts of slimeballs, it's hard to say where the payouts might end.

Below, an excerpt of the scams allegedly perpetrated on the lead plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift.

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Raphaël Labbé)

[Full court filing]

Stewart represented an accused terrorist. During his trial she relayed a message from him, regarding his thoughts on a cease-fire with Egypt, to a Reuters reporter. She then clarified the statement. This was part of her commitment to committing murder in a foreign country, apparently!

If, as prosecutors argue, Stewart knowingly violated specific restrictions again passing any messages from her client to any third parties, including the media, then, whatever, press charges. (Not that those specific rules seem particularly constitutional. And not that we should be complicit in the destruction of attorney-client privilege just because we really don't like terrorists.) But "conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism" seems like more than a bit of a stretch. You shouldn't really be locking up left-wing nuts for being naive about the beliefs and intentions of their clients. (And naive about the lengths to which the Bush Justice Department would go to appear to be serious about terror.)

Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison. The court of appeals did not specify how much tougher they'd like her sentence to be, but prosecutors sought up to 30 years. Stewart is 70 and about to go into surgery for breast cancer. And your IndyMedia types are about to start calling Obama a fascist, just like Glenn Beck!

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Sacramento-based Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for people who faced "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars.'" The firm, which said it has launched an investigation into such scams, specializes in class action suits, among other areas.

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch has posted a series of articles on the issue of sleazy revenue models for online games, exposing the practice of sneaking mobile data subscriptions and pricey "learning CD" packages past players trying to earn online "points." Mafia Wars and Farmville creator Zynga gets a third of its revenue from such "commercial offers," while Facebook in turn gets 10-20 percent of its money from Zynga, according to Arrington.

Zynga has yanked some of its ads; Facebook, in turn, has suspended one of Zynga's smaller games. But there's evidence this issue could have been addressed much sooner. TechCrunch found video (below) shot this past spring in which Zynga's CEO said he "did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away."

That sounded bad enough when it was reprinted on a tech blog; imagine how it's going to sound in court.

(Top pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, possibly calling his lawyer, by Joi Ito.)

he allegedly brewed the distilled resins of pot fermented with 180-proof grain alcohol.
The concoction was supposed to be mixed with juice or soda.

"Liquid marijuana," shit. At $120 for a Pepsi bottle full! In my day we called that "drinking the bong water," and it was free.
[Pic of what this probably looked like, via]

According to a statement issued by the couple's attorney, Richard will plead to attempting to influence a public servant—a felony—and Mayumi will plead to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report. Prosecutors, the statement said, have agreed to recommend a sentence of probation, meaning no jail time. According to CNN, prosecutors couldn't be reached to confirm the deal.

The deal was precipitated, the Heene's attorney said, by prosecutors' threat to deport Mayumi, who is a Japanese national. From the statement:

It is supremely ironic that law enforcement has expressed such grave concern over the welfare of the children, but it was ultimately the threat of taking the children's mother from the family and deporting her to Japan which fueled this deal.

It's even more supremely ironic that the attorney for a woman who deliberately threw her child into the middle of a self-generated media shitstorm and commanded him to lie and watched him throw up on TV so she could be on TV more is calling prosecutors' legitimate concern for that child's welfare under her care "ironic."

We can only hope that the district attorney bars any reality TV deals as a condition of probation.

When the attack first happened in October of 2008, there was speculation that Pressly's role as an Ann Coulter-like figure in W might have had something to do with it. Turns out, no:

In various confessions made to the police, Mr. Vance said he went to Ms. Pressly's neighborhood looking to steal laptop computers. After entering her home through a Dutch door she left open for her dogs, Mr. Johnson said, Mr. Vance found the computer he sought - and Ms. Pressly.

Curtis Vance, the 29 year-old killer (pictured), is now facing the death penalty.
[Pic via]

One might say the hotel's guests are really getting into the spirit of the place! The Standard did everything it could to encourage its reputation as a $400 a night orgy den. Let's look back at this nice NY Post story from September 2:

Even hotel staffers and managers get in on the act, workers said, stripping down and posing provocatively in front of the massive floor-to-ceiling windows to draw attention to the hotel, which straddles the city's new High Line Park.

"We don't discourage it. In actual fact, we encourage it," a friendly bellhop told a pair of reporters as they checked in yesterday at The Standard, where randy guests cavort with abandon to the dismay — or delight — of parkgoers below.

Fucking in front of the assembled crowds below was actually the basis of the hotel's marketing policy, in a very thinly veiled way. Well, now we can officially dub that a "miscalculation;" last weekend, a hotel guest decided to help himself to the cleaning lady. She came in his room; he started chatting her up, asked if she had a boyfriend, asked if she thought he was handsome, then went ahead and jumped on her. (He was unsuccessful).

Could have happened anywhere, of course. But it's probably a much smaller mental leap for a horny hotel guest to decide that the cleaning lady must be interested in a quick fuck if he's staying in a place that's already been all over the tabloids for running ads saying "We'll put up with your banging if you'll put up with ours." Orgies are included with the room rate, right?

Hard to believe that not one marketing person, at any point, said, "These ads are edgy and all, but it sure would suck for us if any sex crimes happened in this place. Ya know?" Anyhow, expect the Standard Hotel to come up with some new taglines soon. It is very convenient to transportation!
[Pic: Ed Yourdon]

Who's to say that flying milk carton is not full of kerosene? Go, NYT:

Diana Shulla-Cose, president and co-founder of Perspectives Charter Schools, said that an on-campus police officer had called for backup as the food fight escalated and that the resulting heavy police presence had led in turn to the large number of arrests.

Any time you're in need of assistance, call the police, and they will arrest somebody, for something, or, failing that, arrest you.

UPDATE: The PR person from Perspectives Charter School sent us a lengthy statement on this, which can be summarized as "The event is not reflective of the culture of our school." Duly noted.
[Pic via]

Allow alleged extortionist Joe Halderman's attorney to lay it all out for you how it really happened: after Joe discovered Letterman was boning Joe's girlfriend, still, he thought, hey, great idea for a screenplay!

The lawyer says this was not extortion, calling it "a pure commercial transaction." The lawyer says Halderman was merely trying to sell the exclusive screenplay rights to Letterman.

Who would enjoy a screenplay of Letterman's sexual foibles more than the man himself? So, can Joe go now? And also he'd like his job back.
[Pic: Getty]

Before 1995, according to the Roanoke County Circuit Court clerk's office, Virginia law required a psychiatric evaluation and documented explanation for why a resident needed to carry a concealed handgun. But by the time Hasan applied in October 1995, all that was required was a criminal background check and certification of a gun safety course. For some reason proof of having completed individual infantry training in the U.S. Army (next slide) was not enough for the Commonwealth of Virginia when it came to gun safety and Hasan had to take an NRA course as well. Above is the certificate of completion of an NRA "Personal Protection Course" that Hasan filed with the court. (You can read the entire application here.)

Here is his certificate of infantry training, submitted with the application. It was completed in 1988, when Hasan was 18 years old, which serves as definitive proof that he signed up with the army immediately after graduating from high school. His family has confirmed that timeline to reporters, but Virginia Tech, where he attended college, has said it has no record of Hasan participating in the school's ROTC program, leading some to believe he signed up after college.

Here is Hasan's fingerprint card. According to the application, he passed a criminal background check conducted by the Vinton Police Department.

A photocopy of Hasan's Virginia driver license. Note the address.