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Study shows that cannabis use is linked to psychotic mental illness

The study aimed to answer a question that has been unsettling psychiatrists for some time. People with psychosis, whose symptoms include hallucinations, paranoia, hearing voices and a persecution complex, are more likely than not to have a marijuana habit.

But doctors have not known whether they are smoking it for relief from their symptoms, or whether cannabis itself might be the problem.
[...]
It shows that regular cannabis smoking increased the risk of developing psychosis by 6% over four years.

But there was a substantially greater impact on young people who had already been identified by psychiatrists as having the potential to become psychotic. Regular cannabis smoking raised their risk of developing psychotic mental illness by 25%.

The study, published in the online version of the British Medical Journal, followed 2,437 young people living in Munich, Germany.

All had a psychiatric assessment at the start of the study, to identify those who might be vulnerable to psychosis. Four years later, they were asked about their cannabis use and their mental health was assessed again. Regular users of cannabis who had been identified as vulnerable to psychosis were much more likely to become psychotic than those who were neither.

Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, said there were still many unanswered questions, such as: "If half the world smokes cannabis, why aren't they all psychotic?"

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Lycos distributes DDOS tool that only targets spammers. - is surprised when thousands of users constantly dragging content from sites for the express purpose of driving bandwidth costs up and making sites inaccessible is considered a DDOS attack.

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Microsoft unveils new "Windows XP: In Welsh" People For The Ethical Treatment Of Vowels protest, throwing alphaghetti at Bill Gates.

More CIBC badness:

A CIBC cash machine was recently dispensing Canadian Tire money at a Moncton mall.

Kayla Peters, 16, said she was shocked when she withdrew $60 on Nov. 29. She received two $20 bills and two $2 bills in Canadian Tire money. "I just stood there for a second wondering what I should do, but then I heard some other people talking about it and it turned out I wasn't the only one."

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce officials say four people have been reimbursed for the mistake. "It clearly must have come in from maybe some of our business customers who package up their own cash," said Rob McLeod, spokesperson for the bank. "We're still tracking down exactly what the source was."

McLeod says CIBC has confiscated the fake money as part of its investigation.

The ATM spat out 11 Canadian Tire bills in denominations ranging from 10 cents to $2.

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78 year-old motorist going 130 km/h on crowded highway receives message from his GPS navigator to "make a u-turn immediately". He does so. Hilarity ensues.

While I'm on the topic of drivers suffering from senile dementia,
66 year-old woman leads police on low-speed chase for 15 miles, finally being stopped by spike strip.

She refused to stop for the marked police vehicle, with it's flashing lights and siren, because it was a truck, and "Police drive CARS!"

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Drunken pilot who buzzed nuclear power plant sentenced to jail time

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US Marine Corps admits to firebombing Iraqis.

They had previous claimed not to have used "napalm" in any circumstances, and insisted that reports that they had done so were false. This is technically correct - instead of jellied gasoline that clings and burns("napalm"), these bombs use jellied *jet fuel* that clings and burns. ("remarkably similar to napalm")

USMC insists that this is an important distinction because the jet-fuel mixture is "less harmful to the environment", and that distinction justifies their previous claims that "no such bombs were used nor does the United States have any napalm weapons" when asked if they were using napalm.

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The Turducken: A turkey, stuff with a whole duck, which in turn is stuffed with a whole chicken.

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"Abstinence Educators" deliberately misinforming children about sex.

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.

Several million children age 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula -- those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman's investigators:

- A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."

- HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.

- Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

"I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," Waxman said. "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

Some course materials cited in Waxman's report present as scientific fact notions about a man's need for "admiration" and "sexual fulfillment" compared with a woman's need for "financial support." One book in the "Choosing Best" series tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. "Moral of the story," notes the popular text: "Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."

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US Government insists that "POWs" have no right to due process, no right to a fair trial, no right to see evidence against them, and no right to counsel.

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George Bush's former New England campaign chairman indicted on election fraud charges

The indictment charges Tobin with conspiracy to commit telephone harassment and aiding and abetting of telephone harassment. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

The indictment alleges that Tobin and coconspirators sought to disrupt communications to five phone numbers associated with the Democratic Party and one with the firefighter's union.

"The participants in the scheme allegedly planned to accomplish the disruption by hiring a company to call those six numbers repeatedly through the day and hang up, with intent to annoy and harass those called and disrupt those two organizations' efforts to encourage and assist citizens in exercising their right to vote," a news release from the Justice Department said.

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Virginia gas station owned by a Sikh burned down, and ethnic slurs painted all over the property

.. and is this an American newspaper covering it? The Washington Post, perhaps?

Nope. A Malaysian paper, because violence against people who wear turbans isn't newsworthy in the USA, despite it hitting the wire services three days ago.

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Canada win the battle of Toledo.

The Canadian government, unhappy for many years with Washington's belligerent foreign policy and fearful of its massive weapons stockpiles, decided last year to invade the U.S., seizing oil refineries and manufacturing plants, and establishing "regime change" to the delight of many of its neighbors to the south.
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I love this article.

I also love this article.

The Iraqi elections, originally set for January 2005, have been delayed six months to give the Iraqi people enough time to produce and air negative political ads, the White House announced today.

"The purpose of these elections is to foster democracy in Iraq, but without negative ads, there is no democracy," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

The decision to delay the Iraqi vote was the brainchild of White House political strategist Karl Rove, who said he was "dismayed" by the state of Iraqi's negative advertising infrastructure.

"Their understanding of how to use distortions, unflattering photographs and scary-sounding announcers is rudimentary at best," Mr. Rove said. "If the elections were to go forward without professionally-produced attack ads, the whole process would be seen as a sham."

In order to teach the Iraqi people how to make corrosive, below-the-belt television spots, Mr. Rove has ordered the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group whose ads proved particularly effective during the 2004 presidential campaign, to parachute into Baghdad at once.

Davis Hartnett, a spokesman for the veterans group, said that they were already helping Iraqi citizens produce a series of negative ads attacking the Vietnam record of one potential presidential candidate, the Shiite politician Hassan Yousif.

Reached at his campaign headquarters in Mosul, Mr. Yousif angrily called the ads "the work of madmen," telling reporters, "I did not even serve in Vietnam."

"Our point exactly," Mr. Hartnett said.

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The Moral High Ground:

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Cloaca, the latest work by the Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye, has just closed out its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. It was a room-sized installation of six glass containers connected to each other with wires, tubes and pumps. Every day, the machine received a certain amount of food.

Meat, fish, vegetables and pastries passed through a giant blender, were mixed with water, and poured into jars filled with acids and enzyme liquids. There they got the same treatment as the human stomach would supply. Electronic and mechanical units controlled the process, and after almost two days the food came out of a filtering unit as something close to genuine, human shit.

The installation was placed in a cold, clean space at the museum, where it was nourished by a first class chef who prepared two meals a day in an attached kitchen.

Delvoye has given a name to his harsh creature: Cloaca, referring to the ancient sewer in Rome. But while the cloaca maxima proved to be useful, this Cloaca goes beyond every purpose, except of course revealing of the meaning of art. So, too, the spending and earning of money is part of its purpose. The machine daily delivered turds that were signed and sold for $1,000 each

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Dover, PA school board, not satisfied with teaching Creationism, now to require teaching of Biblical "alternative" to pi in math classes.
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Oh, sure, it's an old joke, but it's still pretty funny.

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