Carolina Woman Accused of Sex with Boy

(Central, South Carolina) A 30-year-old local woman, Tameeca Lashae Watt, has been accused of engaging in sex and biting the neck of a 14-year-old boy, her son's friend.

Watt faces two counts of criminal sexual conduct with a minor.

According to Chief Kerry Avery, the victim spent the night at Watt's house on Johnson Road on March 16 because he was friends with her teenage son.[...]

Watt performed a second sex act on the teen in her car on the side of the road after a trip to a convenience store.

The report said after the boy came home, his mother asked him about the mark on his neck. Watt told the mother that the boy met a girl at a park, and the girl gave him a "hickey," according to the report.

Avery said the mother didn't believe Watt's story, and brought her son the the police station. Avery said the boy told police about having sex with Watt.

Watt was booked into custody at the Pickens County Detention Center with bond set at $40,000.

Sperm Hunters Attack in Zimbabwe




(Harare, Zimbabwe) Male hitchhikers in Zimbabwe, don't travel alone. Beware of attacks by female sperm harvesters.

Local authorities in Zimbabwe are investigating the spate of sexual assaults on men which the attackers believe will bring good luck.

According to the report, naïve travelers are picked up by "gangs of beautiful women" and are drugged and forced to have sex and later dumped on the freeways. Some of the attackers are armed, using guns, knives and, in one instance, a live snake was used to overpower victims, before collecting their semen in condoms.

The news service added that such incidents have been on the rise since 2009, but so far only three women were arrested after police found a stash of knotted condoms in October 2011.[…]

Many suspect that the exact purpose of forcibly collecting semen is meant for business purposes or even "Juju," a form of African witchcraft.

According to the report, attackers refrain from collecting semen from loved ones as the rituals bring bad luck and, in some cases, even death to the victims.

Reportedly, the current market price for a sperm-filled condom is $400.

Companion post at TJR.

An unGRACEful finding

According to some Warmist scientists using the GRACE satellite experiment, the earth's glaciers have been melting at a great rate and pouring a torrent of water into the ocean. See below. So how come sea levels have been falling in recent years? How come lots of other data show Antarctica to be getting cooler, if anything? One has to ask: Could there be something wrong with the GRACE data or its interpretation?

John Wahr (author below) knows of one possibility: The earth moves. He said so in a 2007 paper titled: "Elastic uplift in southeast Greenland due to rapid ice mass loss". So what GRACE is detecting could be at least in part earth movements rather than changes in the ice on top of it.

But the man is clearly dishonest. Look at the last sentence below. He admits that very cold ice won't melt in response to recent small changes in atmospheric temperatures. But how cold are Greenland and the Antarctic? Are they very cold too? They sure are -- averaging around minus 30 degree Celsius for Greenland and minus 40 degrees for Antartica. So on his own admission they COULD NOT be melting. There is something fishy with either the GRACE data or his interpretation of it.

Earth’s glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding about 150 billion tons of ice annually, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all Earth’s glaciers and ice caps between 2003 to 2010 was 1,000 cubic miles, about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie.

“The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study.

The research effort is the first comprehensive satellite study of the contribution of the world’s melting glaciers and ice caps to global sea level rise. The results indicate all the melted ice is raising sea levels by about 0.4 millimeters annually, said

The measurements are important because the melting of the world’s glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.

The researchers used satellite measurements from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to calculate that the world’s glaciers and ice caps lost about 148 billion tons, or about 39 cubic miles of ice annually from 2003 to 2010. The total does not count the mass from individual glacier and ice caps on the fringes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which could add up to an additional 80 billion tons.

“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” said Wahr. “The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”

One unexpected study result from GRACE was that the estimated ice loss from high Asia mountains — including ranges like the Himalaya, the Pamir and the Tien Shan — was only about 4 billion tons of ice annually. Some previous ground-based estimates of ice loss in the high Asia mountains have ranged up to 50 billion tons annually, Wahr said.

“The GRACE results in this region really were a surprise,” said Wahr. “One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and were extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, many of the high glaciers would still be too cold to lose mass even in the presence of atmospheric warming.”

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Spring Break Attack

Bloody Spring Break Attack Caught on Video: MyFoxDFW.com

Florida Woman Accused of Molesting Boy, 6

(Bradenton, Florida) A 40-year-old local woman, Rose M. Hogue, has been accused of molesting a six-year-old boy.

Hogue was arrested Wednesday by Bradenton Police.

The male victim was six years of age when the offense(s) occurred in the 1100 block of 7th Ave. East, Bradenton, Fl.

Ms. Hogue was charged with (3) counts of Lewd or Lascivious Molestation on a child less than 12 years old, which is a Life Felony offense.

Information on booking is unavailable.

Date with Porn Star Nixed

(Oakdale, Minnesota) An 18-year-old student at Tartan High School, Mike Stone, asked porn star Megan Piper, 19, to be his date for the prom.

Piper said yes but the school district said no.

Patty Phillips, superintendent of the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale School District, told FoxNews.com in an email that Piper, 19, would be prohibited from attending the dance because her appearance would be "inconsistent" with two district policies pertaining to visitors to school buildings and sites.

The policy states that any individual or group can be denied entry to those events if the visit is "not in the best interest" of the district, district spokeswoman Jennifer McNeil told FoxNews.com.

Tip: slwlion

Box for Sale




Government surplus pricing. Advertised here.

Tip: Charlie Nestor

Greenies acknowledge complexity for once

Warmist models take into account only a fraction of the potential influences on climate, which is the fundamental reason why they have no predictive skill. But that they take more than one factor in account is very sophisticated by the standards of how science is generally conducted. Particularly in the reports I cover in my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog, medical scientists usually write as if there is just a one-to-one relationship between two variables. The possibility of a third variable complicating the story is rarely considered.

And a good example of such limited thinking among Greenie researchers was the cry of woe when they found that pine beetles are twice as active these days in lodgepole pine forests than they used to be. The Greenies of course attributed that to global warming without asking how a temperature change measured only in tenths of one degree could have such a large effect.

One group of researchers, however, were proper scientists and realized that there were a number of variables involved and decided to study several factors together to get a fuller picture of what is happening. And what they found was that pine beetle infestations REDUCE another great danger to the forests concerned -- fire.

An evolutionary speculation which might flow from that is that the trees have not evolved good defences (such as toxins) against the beetles precisely because the beetles are on balance good for the tree. All that is far too profound for your average Warmist, of course. Journal abstract below:

Do mountain pine beetle outbreaks change the probability of active crown fire in lodgepole pine forests?

By Martin Simard et al.

Disturbance interactions have received growing interest in ecological research in the last decade. Fire and bark beetle outbreaks have recently increased in severity and extent across western North America, raising concerns about their possible interactions. Although it is often presumed that bark beetle outbreaks increase probability of active crown fire by producing high loads of surface and canopy dead fuels, empirical data are scarce and results are ambivalent. We combined field measurements and modeling to address the following question: How do fuel characteristics, microclimate, and potential fire behavior change with time since a severe mountain pine beetle outbreak in Pinus contorta forests of Greater Yellowstone (Wyoming, USA)? We measured surface and canopy fuels, and soil surface temperature in a time-since-beetle-outbreak chronosequence (n = 35 sites) from undisturbed to 36 years post-outbreak, including stands in red- and gray-needle stages (respectively, 1–2 and 3–5 years post-outbreak). Field data were used to parameterize the fire behavior model NEXUS and predict potential fire behavior at each site.

Dead surface fuel loads of all size categories did not differ among undisturbed, red, and gray-stage stands. Compared to undisturbed sites, red and gray-stage sites had on average 53% lower canopy bulk density, 42% lower canopy fuel load, and 29% lower canopy moisture content, but had similar canopy base heights (3.1 m). In subsequent decades, coarse wood loads doubled and canopy base height declined to 0 m. Modeling results suggested that undisturbed, red, and gray-stage stands were unlikely to exhibit transition of surface fires to tree crowns (torching), and that the likelihood of sustaining an active crown fire (crowning) decreased from undisturbed to gray-stage stands. Simulated fire behavior was little affected by beetle disturbance when wind speed was either below 40 km/h or above 60 km/h, but at intermediate wind speeds, probability of crowning in red- and gray-stage stands was lower than in undisturbed stands, and old post-outbreak stands were predicted to have passive crown fires. Results were consistent across a range of fuel moisture scenarios. Our results suggest that mountain pine beetle outbreaks in Greater Yellowstone may reduce the probability of active crown fire in the short term by thinning lodgepole pine canopies.

Ecological Monographs 81:3–24. 2011

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Scientology Books Banned in Russia

From RFERL:

A Moscow regional court has upheld a lower court decision declaring books on Scientology to be extremist literature and banning publication or distribution of books from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

That's a shame.

Mexican Mom Accused of Burning Child

(Raleigh, North Carolina) A 29-year-old Mexican woman, Yesenia Alvarez, has been accused of felony child abuse for allegedly burning her 11-year-old child on the hands.

An arrest warrant alleges that Yesenia Alvarez, 29, of 4359 Old Poole Road "did intentionally inflict seriously bodily injury" on the child, who suffered second-degree burns on the hands.

Investigators did not release further details about the child or the crime.[…]

She appeared in Wake County District Court Wednesday, where she told a judge she did not want to return to Mexico because she has been threatened by her husband.

Alvarez was booked into custody at the Wake County Jail with bond set at $25,000. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency issued an immigration detainer.

Michigan Teacher Gets Prison in Sex Case - Updated

(Traverse City, Michigan) Earlier this month, former teacher and coach at Traverse City West Senior High School, Lisa Placek, 45, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal sexual conduct/assault with intent to commit sexual penetration of a 15-year-old boy.

She was originally charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct after police said she had oral sex with a West sophomore male student in December.

Yesterday morning, Placek appeared before Leelanau County 13th Circuit Court Judge Thomas Power and was sentenced to a minimum of 23 months in prison.

* * * * *
Michigan Teacher and Boy, 15
[Previous 2/1/12 post]
(Traverse City, Michigan) A language arts teacher and girls volleyball coach at Traverse City West High School, Lisa Placek, has been accused of engaging in sexual conduct with a 15-year-old male student.

Placek faces a charge of first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Superintendent Steve Cousins says she resigned last week.

Court documents say police believe Placek committed a sexual act on a 15-year-old male student in her vehicle in Leelanau County's Elmwood Township on Dec. 31. District officials contacted police after getting an anonymous tip.

Placek was booked into custody with bail denied. A court appearance is scheduled for February 10.

Girl Scout Leader Accused of Stealing Cookie Dough

(Fond du Lac, Wisconsin) A 28-year-old Girl Scout Leader, Samantha L. Abrahamson, has been accused of theft for allegedly stealing all the cookie money collected by her group of girls.



The total amount taken is reportedly about $4,000. Abrahamson faces five counts of misdemeanor theft.

A criminal complaint alleges that Abrahamson, the Girls Scouts leader of seven girls in Fond du Lac, would receive the money gathered by girls in her troop and then use it on personal expenses.

According to the criminal complaint:

Abrahamson was committing the crimes between March and December of 2008.

She also failed to show up for two scheduled meetings with Detective Dan Razner.

When Abrahamson was tracked down in December 2011, she allegedly admitted to spending the cash and never opening a bank account for the money made by cookie sales.

Abrahamson explains she was doing pills at the time.

Heh. Whatever happened to the days when the Girl Scouts were viewed as examples of moral and ethical purity?

Hubba Hubba Hubcaps




(Edmonton, Canada) The libertarian Wildrose party launched its legislative campaign this week with a bus emblazoned with a picture of the party leader, Danielle Smith. Unfortunately, Danielle's photo appears above the two rear tires, making them look like her breasts.

The picture and story have gone viral on the interwebs.

Tip: Charlie Nestor

French School Shootings

(Toulouse, France) The heinous murders of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school this week were allegedly committed by 24-year-old Mohammed Merah, a Frenchman of Algerian origin who claims he is a member of al-Qaeda.

The Jawa Report writers are investigating and reporting. Go visit.

Note that descriptions of the murders are particularly barbaric.

Hilarious! The new British climate record (HadCRUT4) reinforces how FLAT average temperatures have been in the last 12 years

The differences between years are only in hundredths of one degree! How trivial can you get?

The media have almost unanimously said that HadCRUT4 now makes 2010 the hottest year. But what HadCRUT4 actually shows is that 2010 ties with 2005 for the hottest year and a trivial 0.01 deg C above 1998. Given the errors (0.1 deg C or ten times the difference being quoted) the only scientifically respectable way to describe the warmest years would be to say that 1998, 2005 and 2010 all tied, but that would have perhaps been a little to inconvenient. I note that NasaGiss, and here, faced a similar problem but chose to follow the respectable route in not calling a record if a year has a temperature difference of only 0.01 deg C.

In fact a better way to summarise HadCRUT4 is that one cannot rank with confidence the top eight years (ranging from 0.53 to 0.48 deg C) so they should all be declared statistically indistinguishable.

Bad Practice

It is regrettable, and in my view poor form, to release the HadCRUT4 top ten years and not simultaneously release the complete dataset so that a more detailed look can be made at the time the media are compiling their stories based on the Met Office press release. Not releasing the full dataset could lead to accusations of ‘spinning’ the data. The HadCRUT4 complete data is said to be available in a few days. There is no reason why the Met Office’s press release of the 19th March could not have been held for a few days to coincide with the full data. In most other scientific disciplines this is standard practice.

Some parts of the media are claiming that HadCRUT4 shows an increased warming since 1998 of 0.11 deg C (said to be 0.04 deg C more). However, until the full data is available it will not be possible to look at this figure in more detail though looking at the data that is available I don’t think that figure will stand up.

Also mentioned in the Met Office press release is the global warming ‘signal’ seen since 1900, which they say is 0.75 deg C. Of course that ‘signal’ is not homogenous as we have discussed because it includes the periods not influenced by mankind and those said to be under his influence.

Overall the new HadCRUT4 dataset does not seem to change anything. It even seems to emphasise the lack of warming in the past 10-15 years more than HadCRUT3 did. Although we do not yet have HadCRUT4 data for 2008 it is obvious that HadCRUT4 has less variance in this short period. HadCRUT3 had a range of 0.12 between the top ten warmest years with a fairly even spread. HadCRUT4 has the top three years separated by 0.01 and years 4 -8 also separated by 0.01 deg C, in fact years 4,5,6,7 are identical numerically.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

San Francisco Pot Kerfuffle

(San Francisco, California) District Attorney George Gascón has issued a position paper stating that local dispensaries are illegally selling marijuana.

“Yes,” said David Goldman, a medical cannabis patient and leading member of Americans for Safe Access in San Francisco.

“It doesn't look good. It severely jeopardizes safe access.”

A PDF of the memo from Gascón’s office began circulating last weekend. Gascon’s office filed the memo in San Francisco County Superior Court in a case against a medical cannabis dispensary that delivered the anti-nausea drug to a collective member.

It's not clear how the controversy will be resolved. Existing laws and regulations are somewhat ambiguous.

Mississippi Teacher Gets Probation in Sex Case



Jennifer McCullum before Judge Helfrich
(Hattiesburg, Mississippi) Former teacher at Petal High School, Jennifer McCullum, appeared before 12th District Court Judge Robert Helfrich yesterday and pleaded guilty to sexual battery upon a 17-year-old male student.

Sexual episodes reportedly occurred between November 2009 and January 2010.

As a result of the plea, McCullum was sentenced to five years of probation.

A Country Flooded with Guns

(Mexico City) According to this report, the entire nation of Mexico has one legal gun store, located on a military base and operated by the army.

Chinese Learning French to Emigrate to Canada

"Sacre bleu!"

(Beijing, China) Despite the economic surge experienced by China in recent years, Chinese citizens still crave a ticket out of the communist country.

Chinese desperate to emigrate have discovered a backdoor into Canada that involves applying for entry into the country's francophone province of Quebec -- as long as you have a good working knowledge of the local lingo.

So, while learning French as an additional language is losing ground in many parts of the world -- even as Mandarin classes proliferate because of China's rise on the international stage -- many Chinese are busy learning how to say, "Bonjour, je m'appelle Zhang."[…]

Despite China's growing prosperity and clout, more and more of its citizens are rushing to the exits, eager to provide better education prospects for their children and escape from their country's long-standing problems, including hazardous pollution and contaminated food.

The province of Quebec has its own immigration procedures, apart from the Canadian national policy, without any cap or backlog.

Simply acquire a working knowledge of the French language and you're accepted as an immigrant. Afterward, new arrivals can move to any location in the entire nation.

Companion post at Immigration Watch.

Warmists revise their facts once again

Having global warming evangelists in charge of the temperature record is a joke and their unending "adjustments" of it show vividly what a joke it is. See Anthony Watts for details of their track record.

But note something amusing: The temperature differences they talk about are so tiny that they are still statistically insignificant (i.e. are indistinguishable from random fluctuations) even after all the "adjustments". At that rate there will be more adjustments coming down the pike, I am sure

And an important logical point: If their past facts were wrong, how can we know that the latest facts are right? Constantly-changing facts lack credibility as facts at all.

Britain's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which for years maintained that 1998 was the hottest year, has published new data showing warmer years since, further undermining a sceptic view of stalled global warming.

The findings could helpfully move the focus from whether the world is warming due to human activities - it almost certainly is - to more pressing research areas, especially about the scale and urgency of human impacts.

After adding new data, the CRU team working alongside Britain's Met Office Hadley Centre said on Monday that the hottest two years in a 150-year data record were 2005 and 2010 - previously they had said the record was 1998.

None of these findings are statistically significant given the temperature differences between the three years were and remain far smaller than the uncertainties in temperature readings.

CRU drew fire during the 2009 "Climategate" scandal which derailed UN talks in Copenhagen and tripped up efforts at a U.S. climate bill. It was sparked after leaked emails showed CRU scientists, led by Phil Jones, sniping at rivals. The CRU was criticised in subsequent public enquiries for not sharing data but exonerated of any manipulation.

Nevertheless, it was the most cautious major climate research centre, in cooperation with the Met Office Hadley Centre, holding the view that 1998 was the hottest year in an observation record dating back to around 1850.

Its peers are the U.S.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Both had already found that 2005 and 2010 were warmer than 1998. They used an approach which gave more weight to the Arctic, where temperatures have risen faster than the rest of the world, but where there are also fewer observations.

They expanded Arctic coverage by statistically inferring warming in areas without weather stations, using neighbouring observations.

Now the CRU-Hadley Centre team have included more than 400 extra actual Arctic observations from Russia and Canada, as these countries have made these available, leading to the change in the annual ranking, which is based on fractions of a degree.

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).