THE BUNKER 3.0

An Oklahoma bill that would ban the sale of food containing aborted human fetuses has some people wondering: What food currently contains aborted human fetuses?

The bill, introduced Jan. 18 by  State Sen. Ralph Shortey, prohibits the manufacture or sale of "food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients."

Shortey declined to give specific examples  but said some food manufacturers used stem cells in the research and development process.

"There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors," he told KRMG Radio. "I don't know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here."

Shortey may be acting on claims that the San Diego-based company Semonyx used proteins derived from human embryonic kidney cells to test artificial sweeteners, NPR reported. The cell line, known as HEK 293, was created from a human embryo in 1970 and has become a staple in biochemistry labs around the world.

Some people are calling the bill a back-door attempt to ban embryonic stem cell research - a ban Shortey said he would support, KRMG reported.

Indeed, embryonic stem cell research is  controversial. Critics argue it destroys embryos, which they consider the earliest form of life. But proponents say stem cell research could cure diseases. Last week, for example,  embryonic stem cells were found to improve vision in two women who were legally blind.

If passed, the bill would take effect Nov. 1.

A court of appeal in the city of Nimes, southern France, convicted Jihad’s mother Bouchra Bagour and his uncle Zeyad for “glorifying a crime” in relation to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001.

“We have to rule that they (the mother and uncle) knew of the provocative nature of the T-shirt,” said the counsel for the prosecution.

She had claimed the stunt was just “a joke” and not been intended to cause offense.

The court handed the mother a one month suspended prison sentence as well as €2,000 fine.

Jihad’s uncle, who bought the sweater for the boy, was slapped with a €4,000 fine and a two-month suspended prison sentence.

The court head how the uncle had bought the top and given it to the mother, who dressed him in it and took him to school on September 25.

Jihad's teacher alerted the authorities and a few days later the town mayor, Thierry Lagneau of the conservative UMP party, asked prosecutors to investigate.

Both of them previously pleaded their innocence in court, claiming they thought the T-shirt would “make people laugh”.

“For me the text is simply my son’s name and his date of birth,” Bagour had said. “It’s a bit different but I thought it would make people laugh.

“My brother gave my son the sweatshirt, I put it on him, and I never thought anything of it.”

For his part, the uncle Zeyad, 29 said: “I had no intention of being provocative or shocking people.

“For me the words ‘I am a bomb’ mean ‘I am beautiful’”.

But his excuse did not hold water with the lawyers for the Mayor of Sorgues.

“Idiocy is often the best alibi to hide our real intentions,” said Claude Avril. “The most scandalous aspect of this is the manipulation of a three year-year-old to convey the words of terrorism.”

The mother and uncle of the boy, who official records show was born on September 11, 2009 and was given Jihad as his first name, were not known Islamists, prosecutors said.

The pair had previously been found not guilty by a court in Avignon earlier this year, but following that decision prosecutors decided to take the case to the court of appeal.

After the appeal judge overturned the acquittal on Friday, defense lawyer Gaële Guenoum said the ruling was “severe, surprising and amazing” adding she was considering taking the to the supreme court. 

SEE ALSO: Air France pilot's 'joke' about Moroccan king lands him in hot water 

There was another significant legal case brewing in France on Friday after a webmaster became the first Frenchman to be charged with the offence of "provoking terrorism".

The 26-year-old Muslim convert, identified as Romain, was held on Tuesday accused of translating sections of the Jihadist magazine "Inspire" into French.

This is a wall engraving from Abri Castanet, a shallow cave in southern France's Vezere valley. It's the oldest known cave etching, probably dating back around 37,000 years—and the researchers claim it depicts female genitalia.

Since 1994, a team of researchers has moved its focus from the other oldest inhabited caves in France, at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. Instead, the team has settled down to work in Abri Castanet, and has found evidence of occupation dating back as far as 40,000 years.

Most recently, they discovered a portion of the cave that had been previously unexplored. They found a bunch of bones of reindeer and other animals, and when they carbon dated them, they all clustered in an age range dating them back 36,000 to 37,000 years.They also found these engravings—and so with, with some certainty, are able to claim that they are the oldest of their kind, at around 37,000 years old, a finding they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. While it may sound tenuous, according to Science numerous academics agree that these are indeed the oldest engravings yet to be found. There are some older paintings we know of, but not engravings. But what about the content of the images? In fact, there's a long-standing history of artworks depicting female genitalia across ancient sites in France. Or, perhaps more accurately, there's a long-standing history of interpreting them as such. Harold Dibble, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explained to Science that the concept of the images depicting female genitals may "tell us more about the people making those interpretations". Then again, if you'd spent the last 18 years digging through a remote cave system, you'd probably be seeing lady parts everywhere, too.

A mother-of-eight who had an up to 10-litre a day Coca-Cola drinking habit never knew that excessive consumption of the beverage was contributing to her health problems, an inquest into her sudden death heard today.

The Otago-Southland coroner David Crerar heard that Natasha Marie Harris died, aged 30, after a cardiac arrest.

At the time of her death, her partner Chris Hodgkinson spoke out that it was the result of drinking too much Coca-cola and held the company responsible for her death, a claim Coca-Cola rejected but the company was sufficiently concerned that they hired a security firm to protect their Invercargill staff.

Hodgkinson told the court that she had been unwell up to a year before her death, including vomiting six times a week, but Ms Harris, himself and family members believed it was from the stress of managing her eight children and gynecological problems.

"She drank at least 10 litres a day. As a family we would buy four 2.5 litres a day, the maximum on special. The Coke would be for Natasha to consume over the course of the day.

The first thing she would do in the morning was have a drink of Coke and the last thing she would do in the day was have a drink of Coke by her bed.''

Police estimated she consumed, on average, seven litres a day.

He said she was addicted to Coke and without it she would get moody, irritable and be low in energy. Yet, he never suspected that the beverage was making her ill.

"I never thought about it. It's just a soft drink, just like drinking water. I didn't think a soft drink was going to kill her.''

Medical evidence stated that the main finding of death was from a cardiac arrhythmia.
Dr Dan Mornin told the court Harris probably had severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood, relating to excessive consumption of soft-drink.

He said although it was difficult to confirm this from post-mortem tests, it was consistent with her symptoms of tiredness and lack of strength and other cases of heavy soft-drink consumers, and it was likely her daily vomiting was due to too much caffeine, medically known as caffeine toxicity.

She was lovin' it a little too much.

Manatee resident Christine Faith Baker, 47, was arrested after she allegedly offered sexual favors for two McDonald's dollar-menu cheeseburgers, according to the Miami Herald.

An undercover officer invited Baker into his car on Friday and started talking about sex. Baker allegedly said that her fee was two McDoubles -- the dollar-menu version of a double cheeseburger -- costing a grand total of $2.75.

Of course, Baker was also allegedly looking for a tip of another $40 for her services, the Bradenton Herald reported.

The detective bought the burgers and drove to a vacant lot, where other agents arrested Baker on charges of prostitution. It's yet unclear whether she was allowed to eat the delicious doubles before she was taken to jail.

Baker was released on Saturday.

The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".

"I'm weird. Other kids don't like me," said Sarah, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit and bipolar disorders and who is conscious of being overweight. "They were saying a lot of rude things to me. Just picking on me. So I sprayed myself with perfume. Then they said: 'Put that away, that's the most terrible smell I've ever smelled.' Then the teacher called the police."

The policeman didn't have far to come. He patrols the corridors of Sarah's school, Fulmore Middle in Austin, Texas. Like hundreds of schools in the state, and across large parts of the rest of the US, Fulmore Middle has its own police force with officers in uniform who carry guns to keep order in the canteens, playgrounds and lessons. Sarah was taken from class, charged with a criminal misdemeanour and ordered to appear in court.

Each day, hundreds of schoolchildren appear before courts in Texas charged with offences such as swearing, misbehaving on the school bus or getting in to a punch-up in the playground. Children have been arrested for possessing cigarettes, wearing "inappropriate" clothes and being late for school.

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

"We've taken childhood behaviour and made it criminal," said Kady Simpkins, a lawyer who represented Sarah Bustamantes. "They're kids. Disruption of class? Every time I look at this law I think: good lord, I never would have made it in school in the US. I grew up in Australia and it's just rowdy there. I don't know how these kids do it, how they go to school every day without breaking these laws."

The British government is studying the American experience in dealing with gangs, unruly young people and juvenile justice in the wake of the riots in England. The UK's justice minister, Crispin Blunt, visited Texas last September to study juvenile courts and prisons, youth gangs and police outreach in schools, among other things. But his trip came at a time when Texas is reassessing its own reaction to fears of feral youth that critics say has created a "school-to-prison pipeline". The Texas supreme court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, has warned that "charging kids with criminal offences for low-level behavioural issues" is helping to drive many of them to a life in jail.

The Texas state legislature last year changed the law to stop the issuing of tickets to 10- and 11-year-olds over classroom behaviour. (In the state, the age of criminal responsibility is 10.) But a broader bill to end the practice entirely – championed by a state senator, John Whitmire, who called the system "ridiculous" – failed to pass and cannot be considered again for another two years.

Even the federal government has waded in, with the US attorney general, Eric Holder, saying of criminal citations being used to maintain discipline in schools: "That is something that clearly has to stop."

As almost every parent of a child drawn in to the legal labyrinth by school policing observes, it wasn't this way when they were young.

The emphasis on law and order in the classroom parallels more than two decades of rapid expansion of all areas of policing in Texas in response to misplaced fears across the US in the 1980s of a looming crime wave stoked by the crack epidemic, alarmist academic studies and the media.

"It's very much tied in with some of the hyperbole around the rise in juvenile crime rate that took place back in the early 90s," said Deborah Fowler, deputy director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin legal rights group, and principal author of a 200-page study of the consequences of policing in Texas schools. "They ushered in tough, punitive policies. It was all part of the tough-on-crime movement."

Part of that included the passing of laws that made the US the only developed country to lock up children as young as 13 for life without the possibility of parole, often as accomplices to murders committed by an adult.

As the hand of law and order grew heavier across Texas, its grip also tightened on schools. The number of school districts in the state with police departments has risen more than 20-fold over the past two decades.

"Zero tolerance started out as a term that was used in combating drug trafficking and it became a term that is now used widely when you're referring to some very punitive school discipline measures. Those two policy worlds became conflated with each other," said Fowler.

In the midst of that drive came the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, in which two students in Colorado shot dead 12 other pupils and a teacher before killing themselves. Parents clamoured for someone to protect their children and police in schools seemed to many to be the answer.

But most schools do not face any serious threat of violence and police officers patrolling the corridors and canteens are largely confronted with little more than boisterous or disrespectful childhood behaviour.

"What we see often is a real overreaction to behaviour that others would generally think of as just childish misbehaviour rather than law breaking," said Fowler. Tickets are most frequently issued by school police for "disruption of class", which can mean causing problems during lessons but is also defined as disruptive behaviour within 500ft (150 metres) of school property such as shouting, which is classified as "making an unreasonable noise".

Among the more extreme cases documented by Appleseed is of a teacher who had a pupil arrested after the child responded to a question as to where a word could be found in a text by saying: "In your culo (arse)", making the other children laugh. Another pupil was arrested for throwing paper aeroplanes.

Students are also regularly fined for "disorderly behaviour", which includes playground scraps not serious enough to warrant an assault charge or for swearing or an offensive gesture. One teenage student was arrested and sent to court in Houston after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other after they broke up. Nearly one third of tickets involve drugs or alcohol. Although a relatively high number of tickets – up to 20% in some school districts – involve charges over the use of weapons, mostly the weapons used were fists.

The very young are not spared. According to Appleseed, Texas records show more than 1,000 tickets were issued to primary schoolchildren over the past six years (although these have no legal force at that age). Appleseed said that "several districts ticketed a six-year-old at least once in the last five years".

Fines run up to $500. For poorer parents, the cost can be crippling. Some parents and students ignore the financial penalty, but that can have consequences years down the road. Schoolchildren with outstanding fines are regularly jailed in an adult prison for non-payment once they turn 17. Stumping up the fine is not an end to the offending student's problems either. A class-C misdemeanour is a criminal offence.

"Once you pay it, that's a guilty plea and that's on your record," said Simpkins. "In the US we have these astronomical college and university expenses and you go to fill out the application to get your federal aid for that and it says have you ever been arrested. And there you are, no aid."

In Austin, about 3% of the school district's 80,000 pupils were given criminal citations in the 2007/8 school year, the last date for which figures are available. But the chances of a teenager receiving a ticket in any given year are much higher than that because citations are generally issued to high-school pupils, not those in kindergarten or primary school.

The result, says the Appleseed report, is that "school-to-prison pipeline" in which a high proportion of children who receive tickets and end up in front of a court are arrested time and again because they are then marked out as troublemakers or find their future blighted by a criminal record.

From her perch on the bench in an Austin courtroom, Judge Jeanne Meurer has spent close on 30 years dealing with children hauled up for infractions, some serious, others minor. Some of the difficulties faced by teachers can be seen as Meurer decides whether a parade of children should be released to await trial or held in custody. Meurer switches between motherly and intimidating depending on what she makes of the child before her.

"Some of them are rough kids," she said. "I've been on the bench 30 years and you used to never have a child cuss you out like you do now. I appreciate the frustrations that adults have in dealing with children who seem to have no manners or respect. But these are our future. Shouldn't we find a tool to change that dynamic versus just arresting them in school and coming down with the hard criminal justice hammer?"

Many of those who appear in front of Meurer have learning problems. Children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of police in schools. Simpkins describes the case of a boy with attention deficit disorder who as a 12-year-old tipped a desk over in class in a rage. He was charged with threatening behaviour and sent to a juvenile prison where he was required to earn his release by meeting certain educational and behavioural standards.

"But he can't," she said. "Because of that he is turning 18 within the juvenile justice system for something that happened when he was 12. It's a real trap. A lot of these kids do have disabilities and that's how they end up there and can't get out. Instead of dealing with it within school system like we used to, we have these school police, they come in and it escalates from there."

Sometimes that escalation involves force. "We had one young man with an IQ well below 70 who was pepper-sprayed in the hallway because he didn't understand what the police were saying," said Simpkins. "After they pepper-sprayed him he started swinging his arms around in pain and he hit one of the police officers – it's on video, his eyes were shut – and they charged him with assault of a public servant. He was 16. He was charged with two counts of assault of a public servant and he is still awaiting trial. He could end up in prison."

Austin's school police department is well armed with officers carrying guns and pepper spray, and with dog units on call for sniffing out drugs and explosives.

According to the department's records, officers used force in schools more than 400 times in the five years to 2008, including incidents in which pepper spray was fired to break up a food fight in a canteen and guns were drawn on lippy students.

In recent months the questionable use of force has included the tasering of a 16-year-old boy at a high school in Seguin, Texas, after "he refused to cooperate" when asked why he wasn't wearing his school identification tag. He then used "abusive language". The police said that when an officer tried to arrest the boy, he attempted to bite the policeman. The youth was charged with resisting arrest and criminal trespass even though the school acknowledges he is a student and was legitimately on the grounds.

Such cases are not limited to Texas. In one notorious instance in California, a school security officer broke the arm of a girl he was arresting for failing to clear up crumbs after dropping cake in the school canteen. In another incident, University of Florida campus police tasered a student for pressing Senator John Kerry with an awkward question at a debate after he had been told to shut up.

Sometimes the force is deadly. Last week, Texas police were accused of overreacting in shooting dead a 15-year-old student, Jaime Gonzalez, at a school in Brownsville after he pointed an air gun, which resembled a real pistol, at them outside the principal's office. The boy's father, also called Jaime, said the police were too quick to shoot to kill when they could have wounded him or used another means to arrest him. "If they would have tased him all this wouldn't have happened," he told the Brownsville Herald. "Like people say there's been stand-offs with people that have hostages for hours … But here, they didn't even give I don't think five minutes. No negotiating." The police say Gonzalez defied orders to put the gun down.

Meurer says she is not against police in schools but questions whether officers should regard patrolling the playground the same way they go about addressing crime on the streets.

"When you start going overboard and using laws to control non-illegal behaviour – I mean if any adult did it it's not going to be a violation – that's where we start seeing a problem," she says. "You've gradually seen this morphing from schools taking care of their own environments to the police and security personnel, and all of a sudden it just became more and more that we were relying on law enforcement to control everyday behaviour."

Chief Brian Allen, head of the school police department for the Aldine district and president of the Texas school police chiefs' association, is having none of it.

"There's quite a substantial number of students that break the law. In Texas and in the US, if you're issued a ticket, it's not automatically that you're found guilty. You have an opportunity to go before the judge and plead your case. If you're a teacher and a kid that's twice as big as you comes up and hits you right in the face, what are you going to do? Are you going to use your skills that they taught you or are you going to call a police officer?"

But Allen concedes that the vast majority of incidents in which the police become involved are for offences that regarded as little more than misbehaviour elsewhere.

"Just like anything else, sometimes mistakes are made." he said. "Each circumstance is different and there's no set guideline. There's also something called officer discretion. If you take five auto mechanics and ask them to diagnose the problem of a vehicle, you'll come up with five different solutions. If you ask five different doctors to diagnose a patient, a lot of times you'll have five different diagnoses. Conversely, if you ask five different police officers if they would write a ticket or not for the same offence, you possibly have five different answers."

Parents who have been sucked into the system, such as Jennifer Rambo, the mother of Sarah Bustamantes, wonder what happened to teachers taking responsibility for school discipline.

"I was very upset at the teacher because the teacher could have just stopped it. She could have said: OK class, that's enough. She could have asked Sarah for her perfume and told her that's inappropriate, don't do that in class. But she did none of that. She called the police," she says.

Politicians and civil liberties groups have raised the same question, asking if schools are not using the police to shift responsibility, and accountability, for discipline.

"Teachers rely on the police to enforce discipline," says Simpkins. "Part of it is that they're not accountable. They're not going to get into trouble for it. The parent can't come in and yell at them. They say: it's not us, it's the police."

That view is not shared by an Austin teacher who declined to be named because he said he did not want to stigmatise the children in his class.

"There's this illusion that it's just a few kids acting up; kids being kids. This is not the 50s. Too many parents today don't control their children. Their fathers aren't around. They're in gangs. They come in to the classroom and they have no respect, no self-discipline. They're doing badly, they don't want to learn, they just want to disrupt. They can be very threatening," he says. "The police get called because that way the teacher can go on with teaching instead of wasting half the class dealing with one child, and it sends a message to the other kids."

The Texas State Teachers Association, the state's main teachers union, did not take a position on ticketing at the recent debate in the legislature over Whitmire's proposal to scrap it. But the association's Clay Robison says that most teachers welcome the presence of police in schools.

"Obviously it looks as if some police officers are overreacting at some schools. I'm a parent and I wouldn't want my 17-year-old son hauled in to court if he and another student got in to an argument in a cafeteria. Police officers need to exercise a little bit of common sense but the police are what they are. They enforce the law," he says. "At the same time, years ago, at a school in one of the better neighbourhoods of Austin, a teacher was shot to death in his classroom. It's still a very rare occurrence but it does happen. Anything that increases the security of the teacher is good so they don't have to worry about personal safety and they can concentrate on teaching the kids. We get complaints from some teachers that the police aren't aggressive enough at moving against some of the older juveniles, those that they feel actually do pose a danger to the teachers or the other students."

Because of Sarah Bustamentes's mental disorders, a disability rights group took up her case and after months of legal battles prosecutors dropped the charges. Ask her how she feels about police in schools after her experience and she's equivocal.

"We need police in school. In my school it can get physical and it can turn out very bad," she says. "But they should stop issuing tickets. Only for physical stuff or bullying. Not what you do in class."

An Austrian village with an amusingly obscene name has decided to throw in the towel and vote on whether to change it.

The 100 odd residents of Fucking, in Upper Austria, are to vote this week on whether to change their hamlet's name to something less attractive to English-speaking visitors, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The vote comes eight years after the village defiantly voted to keep its name, despite a spate of thefts of its road signs, largely attributed to itinerant snickering Brits. Clearly, the neighbouring villages of Franking, Hucking and Pfaffing just don't have the same problem.

At the time, Mayor Siegfried Hauppl asked visitors to lay off the signs. These had first become prize swag after British and US soldiers passing through in 1945 illuminated the locals as to the English meaning of Fucking.

Hauppl explained back in 2005: "We had a vote last year on whether to rename the town, but decided to keep it as it is. After all, Fucking has existed for 800 years, probably when a Mr Fuck or the Fuck family moved into the area. The 'ing' was added as a word for settlement."

However, the attentions of Anglo-linguists has now extended to swarms of half-naked women having their pictures taken next to the town's road signs, while the cost of replacing stolen signs continues to mount.

Consequently, Fucking's frustrated burghers are considering whether to substitute a g, or even two gs, for the crucial ck sound.

This could broadly solve the problem, though at the expense of making the town a magnet for fans of British satirical magazine, Private Eye. ®

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, cops pinched a woman after six hours of uninterrupted meth production. No, she wasn't in any sort of lab—she was cooking in Wal-Mart, no Lil B. Cops are making the rather classist-sounding claim that because she couldn't afford to buy any of the chemicals, she was simply helping herself to what was on hand. To each according to his need.

One arresting officer suffered minor chemical burns apprehending the industrious cooker. Another historical marker in Wal-Mart history is made.

A Chinese university has asked students to sign a waiver taking responsibility for their own injury and suicide.

The City College of Dongguan University of Technology, in the Guangdong province, has been distributing a "student management and self discipline agreement" that requires students not to hold the university responsible if they injure themselves or commit suicide on campus, according to China Daily.

More than 5,000 freshmen have signed the contract.

The notion isn't uncommon – last March, the South China Morning Post reported that the Shandong Jianzhu University in Jinan asked about 20,000 students to sign a similar waiver, absolving the university of responsibility for suicide and self-inflicted injuries.

The waivers may have been implemented because China is reported to have the highest suicide rate in the world, with 22 people per 100,000 taking their own lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Based on this number, 287,000 Chinese commit suicide each year.

Still, some parents think the measure is too harsh.

"I think this kind of agreement is irresponsible and unfair…" Ms. Li, a Chinese parent, told Time magazine. She refused to release her full name. "The school should provide counseling services and other help for students instead of trying to absolve themselves of responsibility even before anything has happened.

The (Somerset) Daily American ( ) reports the Meyersdale borough council voted Tuesday night to close the Paul E. Fuller playground. http://bit.ly/18c0rNW

The manure spilled on a hill above the playground Aug. 23, and water flows onto the playground when it rains, apparently carrying bacteria from the manure. Borough workers treated the area with lime, but say bacteria counts including salmonella haven't decreased.

Councilman Roger Miller says his own unscientific methods have confirmed those findings saying, "My nose tells me there's a problem out there."

Miller asked a borough worker about the results of recent bacteria tests and says he was told, "You don't want to know."

___

Information from: Daily American, http://www.dailyamerican.com

According to the Global Times, the surprise attack happened when the woman, surnamed Liu, from Shuangcheng went to top up the bottle with more wine.

Remarkably, the snake, which had been pickling for three months, was still alive.

Liu, who received treatment at a local hospital for inflammation, had bought the snake wine to try and cure her rheumatism.

It is a widely held belief in China that such wines boast medicinal properties

This is not the first incident of a pickled snake seemingly coming back to life.

One Mr Zhang of Hubei Province was bitten by a snake in 2009 that had been preserved in a bottle of rice wine for two months.

While in 2001, a villager from Guangxi Zhuang died a day after being bitten from a pickled snake.

Women who eat chicken while pregnant give birth to boys with smaller penises, according to 'shock-tactic' animal rights group Peta.

In an attempt to ruffle feathers at last weekend's National Buffalo Wings Festival, in Buffalo, New York, Peta wrote to organisers to warn of the effects of the chemical phthalate which is found in chicken flesh.

The letter from Peta’s Lindsay Rajt, to festival founder Drew Cerza, reads: 'The latest scientific evidence shows that the sons of pregnant women who consume chicken are more likely to have smaller penises because of a chemical found in the birds’ flesh.

'In addition, eating cholesterol-laden chicken flesh during pregnancy may also increase unborn babies’ risk of being born with blocked arteries, which can lead to strokes and heart attacks later in life.'

But don't toss out that drumstick just yet.

According to Woman's Health magazine, the research was for the Study for Future Families did not actually look at chicken consumption at all.

While it did identify a link with prenatal phthalate exposure and penis size, chicken was not found to be a food with particularly high levels of the chemical, with spices and fast food packaging being the worst culprits.

Shanna Swan Ph.D., a professor in the department of preventive medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who conducted the research PETA cites, told Women's Health: 'I think any link between eating buffalo wings—even by pregnant women—and the size of their son’s genitals is very tenuous.'

Peta are known for using controversial tactics to highlight the issue of animal suffering including nude models, throwing buckets of blood and a children's comic entitled Your Mommy Kills Animals.

However it appears their latest stunt failed to deter food fans at the Buffalo Wings festival with an estimated 40 tons of chicken wings being consumed.

And in a potentially Peta-pleasing gesture, a meatless alternative was offered for the first time in the festival's 12 year history.

It turned out to be pretty easy to track down some of the suspects in last month's riots in Huntington Beach: some couldn't resist bragging about what happened after the U.S. Open of Surfing.

One suspect in particular made it really easy. Last week the Huntington Beach Police Department posted photos of 25 suspects on Facebook and asked for the public's help identifying them. Two days after the photos were posted, a friend of Luis Enrique Rodriguez, 18, of Anaheim tagged him in the comments of the photo above. Rodriguez responded by liking the post and sharing it on Facebook. Police say that made it pretty easy to track him down.

Yesterday the Anaheim Police Department arrested Rodriguez who is being charged with vandalism, according to Huntington Beach PD's Facebook page. He's accused of writing "fuck the pigs" on police squad cars that responded to the scene of the riot. There's another photo of him on his Facebook profile that features him sitting on top of a squad car that same day—or at least in the same clothes. (Eds. note: a previous post included the a photo that was not Rodriguez but we've swapped in the correct one at right.)

Rodriguez wasn't the only one who couldn't resist sharing his exploits on social media. West Covina resident Niko Johnson, 18, bragged on Twitter about being Huntington Beach's Most Wanted and was later arrested for participating in the riots.

In the days since posting the pictures, Huntington Beach police arrested two other suspects. On August 11, they arrested Anthony Abadier, 20, of Huntington Beach at his home. He's accused of using his skateboard to smash up newspaper stands. On August 11, an unnamed 17-year-old from West Covina turned himself in after detectives contacted his family. He's accused of damaging porta-potties and attempting to tip over a public works truck.

Are you a Verizon customer? If yes, then great, you probably have great service. Their new Share Everything plan comes with unlimited talk, text, data, and NSA wiretaps.

Public outcry over privacy concerns has soared after The Guardian released a top-secret document detailing a court order for Verizon to hand over call records to the American National Security Agency. The mandate was not just a one-time deal either. The court order is currently “ongoing” and on a “daily basis”.

The surveillance conducted sounds like a tale from a dystopian novel but the fact is that Verizon has already released millions of records. The information disclosed includes numbers called or texted, duration, and time. The White House claims that there are strict controls in place that prevent civil liberties from being violated.

White House officials are shifting blame to Congress by saying, “The intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to public statute with the knowledge and oversight of Congress”.

Some surveillance experts are claiming that the government has been stretching the definition of 'relevance' to conduct large scale wiretapping of the public. The secret interpretation of the “public statute” mentioned in the top-secret document appears to sidestep any pretense of explicit suspicion and allow blanket surveillance of innocent people.

FALSE RAPE REPORT: Happens more often than you'd think...

The trial for a UCSB student charged with filing a false police report after orchestrating a violent and bizarre series of events in Santa Cruz this February is scheduled to begin May 23.

Morgan Triplett, 20, told authorities she was beaten and raped by a stranger as she looked for banana slugs along a path on the UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus. She had traveled there for a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender conference. Over the course of their investigation, detectives determined Triplett had actually hired a man through Craigslist to beat her in exchange for sex. While the motive remains unclear, authorities have speculated she organized the entire affair in an attempt to save a troubled relationship.

In the criminal complaint, Santa Cruz County Assistant District Attorney Johanna Schonfield claims that Triplett called 9-1-1 on February 17 to report she had been raped. Law enforcement arrived on the scene, interviewed Triplett, found no suspects, and sent her to a nearby hospital for a sexual assault exam. But, the complaint explains, Triplett refused to give the nurse her clothing despite being told it could contain evidence, and she asked that DNA samples not be sent to the Department of Justice, “which raised red flags in the minds of the investigators.”

Triplett helped a forensic artist sketch an image of the supposed suspect that was then disseminated to the public. As a result, several people were detained and questioned. Parents pulled their children out of school, Schonfield said, and “widespread fear” permeated the community.

Over the next few weeks, “police learned Ms. Triplett has a history of lying, particularly in efforts to save troubled relationships,” Schonfield wrote. The day before she filed the report, Triplett and her boyfriend at the time had broken up. “In response to the ending of this relationship, she claimed she was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child, which was not true,” the complaint reads. “She also previously had told this boyfriend her father had suffered from a heart attack, which he had not, that she had been lost in the desert with amnesia, and that she had ovarian cancer, none of which was true.”

That same day — February 16 — Triplett reportedly posted two ads on Craigslist. One sought a gun owner who would shoot her in the arm or shoulder “with the smallest caliber bullet possible.” She promised she wouldn’t press charges and offered undefined compensation. The other ad asked for someone to beat her up. “Punches, bruises, kicks,” she wrote.

An unnamed individual responded to the second ad and began texting with Triplett. “The two reached an agreement that in exchange for the physical assault Ms. Triplett would have sexual intercourse with him,” Schonfield said. They met February 17 on UCSC’s campus. “Ms. Triplett directed him to hit her repeatedly in the body and face. They had sex and afterwards she used his cell phone screen reflection as a mirror to see if the injuries were bad enough and then directed him to hit her some more.” They parted ways, and Triplett called 9-1-1.

“During the course of the investigation it became very clear that Ms. Triplett is a very troubled young woman who was engaged in self-injurious behavior and been suicidal at points,” the complaint concludes.